PREMIER LEAGUE:Problems are beginning to mount up for the powerbrokers of English football, writes  Andrew Fifield

IN JUNE, the powerbrokers of English football - the ones who wear Armani suits, rather than tracksuits - squeezed into the Bloomberg building in the glass and steel heart of the City of London to engage in some mutual back-slapping and canape-crunching.

The setting was overtly opulent, the guests, plucked from every corner of the sports and media industry, unashamedly well-heeled - all in all, a bash where a pyramid of Ferrero Rocher would have prompted the kind of derisive snort you could measure on the Richter scale.

And as the glasses clinked and business cards were exchanged, Richard Scudamore, the Premier League chief executive and guest of honour for the evening, surveyed the scene with barely disguised satisfaction.

Fast forward three months, and Scudamore's smile has been wiped away. The integrity of his beloved brand has been dragged through the mud with the latest embarrassing development in the Carlos Tevez affair, dissent over clubs being ripped from their communities by mega-bucks foreign owners has reached fever pitch and even financial amateurs who used to believe credit crunch was a type of breakfast cereal are beginning to whisper that a global recession could be the pin that bursts the Premier League bubble.

It is a scenario that even the most on-message PR man would struggle to spin and things are likely to get worse before they get better. This week sees a Football Association disciplinary committee meeting to investigate the poisonous spat between Chelsea ground-staff and Manchester United defender Patrice Evra in April. Whatever the outcome, the spectacle of two of the country's blue riband clubs being dragged before the beak will sling another gobbet of dirt at the game's image.

The blame for the "Battle of Stamford Bridge" cannot be directly pinned on the Premier League, of course, but the link between the organisation's aggressive self-interest - a mentality which screams "make what we can and to hell with the rest" - and the shameful images of Evra scrapping with Sam Bethell are far from spurious.

Only now, it seems, is the Premier League realising it cannot expect its member clubs to behave with decency and decorum when it also treats football's written and unwritten rules with such flagrant disregard. Moral bankruptcy always filters down from the top, like water trickling between the bricks of an old building until the whole edifice is riddled with damp and decay.

The Tevez affair sums it up. The league's initial decision to impose a relatively meagre fine on West Ham for knowingly fielding an ineligible player was bad enough; still worse was either ignoring the club's subsequent reneging on a pledge to tear up Tevez's third party agreement, or failing to ensure they abided by it before Sheffield United were relegated.

The league presumably hoped the issue would simply go away. Instead, the implications have been so ghoulish they could have spilled from the pen of Edgar Allen Poe. Scudamore, the beast with United's blood on his hands, has buried their mutilated corpse under Premier League HQ, only to be driven mad by an incessant beating on the floorboards. Then Lord Griffiths' report thuds on his desk: "I admit the deed! Tear up the planks! It is the beating of that hideous heart!"

A hearty condemnation from a leading law lord doesn't look good for an organisation with pretensions of being one of world sport's major players. Neither, for that matter, does two of its member clubs playing in shirts which look like they have been half-inched from a changing room on Hackney Marshes.

Both West Brom and West Ham have been left devoid of major sponsorship - Albion because nobody was prepared to pay top dollar in the current climate, the Hammers because their backers, XL Holidays, folded - while the partners of Newcastle (Northern Rock) and Manchester United (AIG) are now synonymous with bad news.

It is clear proof the Premier League, for all its TV deals and long-term season ticket sales, is not immune from global economic trends. Companies whose pounds prop up the league but whose profits are drying up are unlikely to pay over the odds when their deals are up for renewal and fans - who, a survey revealed last week, are now paying on average over £100 every match day - could be squeezed out altogether by prices which have been ludicrously inflated. The effects are already palpable, with Newcastle attracting just 20,000 fans to last week's League Cup tie with Spurs and just five Premier League stadiums being filled to capacity last weekend.

A legally discredited membership, revenue streams drying to a trickle and rows upon rows of empty seats do not paint a pleasing picture to either the Premier League or its would-be investors. But when reality starts to bite, Scudamore and his cohorts will have nobody to blame but themselves.