Are Premier League football clubs becoming a luxury plaything too far for football's wealthiest fans?

The appetite for clubs is being tested by the sheer scale of the turmoil in financial markets just as a number of clubs may be now be open to sales.

Questions have mounted this week over West Ham United following the Icelandic financial meltdown.

Bjorgolfur Gudmundsson the former chairman of Landsbanki, the Icelandic bank now in receivership, bought the club for £85m less than two years ago.

West Ham was this week insisting that Landsbanki's fate had no impact on the club and its ownership, and Mr Gudmundsson, who is 100 per cent owner of the club and has made a net investment of £40m.

But that was on Tuesday, and as one person close to the board said, "who knows what will happen next in Iceland?" Another close to the situation said Mr Gudmundsson was now willing to sell.

A prospective buyer for West Ham is said to have already been identified.

Close observers of Tom Hicks and George Gillett's fraught ownership of Liverpool wonder how long the two US sports franchise owners can survive, given that their stadium redevelopment plans have been frozen and they must refinance their debt in the new year.

Everton is up for sale. Its owner Bill Kenwright has openly courted a billionaire to take the club off his hands. Portsmouth comes in and out of "for sale" chatter. "A lot of clubs would welcome external investment right now," said one football financial adviser. "The sources are shrinking."

Buyers are still out there. Newcastle United, whose sale is more to do with the breakdown in trust between owner Mike Ashley and the fans than the credit crunch, is still interesting a number of prospective owners. But people close to the owner accept that the question for each of them has become, "can I make a bid?" as opposed to, "what bid can I make?" Even Chelsea's billionaire owner Roman Abramovich faces more challenged times than in the past after a paper loss running into billions of dollars on his holdings in steel and mining companies.

Still, people close to Mr Abramovich are bullish on his position. John Mann, spokesman for the Russian oligarch, said: "These numbers are arbitrary; we don't put much stock on them."

Privately, the view inside the Abramovich camp was that whatever the size of the losses, they were unrealised. "Will it have any impact on Chelsea? No," one person said.

Two years ago, the Premier League buyers were coming mainly from the US. Now, dealmakers are finding the calls from US entrepreneurs coming in less frequently.

As Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan and other Abu Dhabi investors showed with their show-stopping £210m purchase last month of Manchester City, it is sovereign wealth funds and their offshoots that are likely to be in the forefront of bids for clubs forced by financial bedlam into firesales.

One league down the scale, in the Championship, Charlton Athletic yesterday announced it had received an indicative cash offer from Mohammed Ali Al Hashimi's Zabeel Investments, a Dubai-based investment company.

But even they may find the door of English football's leading clubs starting to close on them. The Football Association and Uefa, European football's governing body, this week warned about the dangers of clubs like Chelsea, Manchester United and Liverpool building up debt. Lord Triesman, FA chairman, said £3bn of debt in English football represented "a tangible danger".

Football's governing bodies worry about competition being stifled by richer, foreign-owned clubs borrowing their way to success. Uefa will next week begin re-examining the bits of their licensing rules relating to debt.

The sub-text of this is a power struggle between the (still) super-rich Premier League, which harbours hopes of exporting games abroad, and the administrators of football.

Premier League revenues for 2006-7 were £1.5bn, with streams coming from TV rights and season ticket sales.

Clubs such as Arsenal, even though the sale of flats at their former stadium is affected by the declining property market, still have the comfort of a debt repayment schedule stretching more than 20 years.

The risk will be greater for those clubs that have relied on short-term debt. "Clubs in the past effectively got their banks to roll over their debt from one year to the next," said one football financier.

"That is not happening and that is not going to happen, you can be sure of that."