Overseas television rights to English Premiership matches for the next three seasons have been sold for more than £625 million on the back of booming demand from armchair fans in Asia and the Middle East, the FA Premier League has announced.

Premier League clubs will see incomes rise by between £10 million to £20 million each from next season after the agreement.

The organisation which runs England's 20-club top flight said yesterday that the sale of broadcasting rights in 81 overseas blocs covering 208 countries and territories would generate a total of £625 million over the course of the 2007/08, 08/09 and 09/10 seasons.

The total is twice the amount raised from the current overseas television deal and it will take the Premiership's total earnings from media and broadcasting rights over the three seasons to just over £2.7 billion.

British and Irish television rights for the same period were sold last year for £1.7 billion while a deal for other media, mainly mobile phone and internet rights, is to raise a further £400 million.

The result of the cash bonanza is that the winner of next season's title will receive around £50 million from prize money and their share of the television money.

The club that finishes bottom of the league can expect a figure in the region of £30 million - the same as Chelsea received for winning the title last season.

Richard Scudamore, the Premier League's chief executive, said the increase was driven by fierce competition for rights in Asia and the Middle East and underpinned by the willingness of clubs to open their doors to foreign players, managers and owners.

"We have a cosmopolitan approach to players and a cosmopolitan approach to ownership and that is paying off," Scudamore said.

"We have seen growth everywhere but the really big jumps have been in Asia and the Middle East.

"No territories have gone down but in some cases the rights have ended up being sold for three or four times the current amount."

One of the fiercest battles for rights was in Hong Kong, where Richard Li's telecommunications group PCCW bid £10 million to claim the rights from the local cable television operator.

Chelsea, Manchester United, Fulham, Portsmouth, Aston Villa and West Ham are already foreign-owned while the investment arm of the government of Dubai is close to completing a £400-million takeover of Liverpool.

Everton, Manchester City and Newcastle have all held talks with potential foreign suitors.

Ironically, the only major club which appears likely to resist the trend is Arsenal, managed by a Frenchman, Arsene Wenger, who regularly fields a team made up entirely of foreigners in the Emirates Stadium.

A fresh injection of cash into football will also inevitably increase concern over the earnings of players and agents and the widening gap between the sport's haves and have-nots.

One consequence of the latest deals will be to massively increase the advantage teams relegated from the Premiership already enjoy over teams who have been in the second-tier Championship for a few seasons.

Scudamore stressed, however, that the Premier League's system allowed for a much fairer share of revenues than similar deals in Italy and Spain, where the biggest clubs negotiate their rights deals themselves.

Unlike domestic revenues, which are shared out depending on where a team finishes in the league and the number of times they appear on television, the overseas rights are split evenly between the 20 clubs.

"The overseas rights ensure that the gap between the highest and the lowest is the narrowest it's ever been," the chief executive said.

He also argued that the plight of Leeds, now struggling in the lower reaches of the Championship after nearly going bust at the start of the decade, had helped to instill a culture of financial discipline in the English game.

Scudamore expects global interest in English football and the consequent value of overseas rights to remain strong, but he acknowledged that the level of growth reflected in this auction was unsustainable.

"This is probably the last time we will be able to achieve such a massive one-off increase," he said.

BSkyB and Setanta will be sharing the domestic (UK) television rights for Premiership matches from next season.

The domestic TV rights auction generated £1.7 billion for the Premier League, with BSkyB paying £1.3 billion for its four packages of games and Setanta £392 million for its two.

Having broken Sky's monopoly, Setanta has rights to 46 live matches a season, while BSkyB has won the rights to 92 live matches, including the "A" package of games kicking off at 4.0pm on Sundays.