Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore, a trim man in his 50s, was in a hurry as he took a cab to West Ham's Upton Park stadium in a scruffy part of east London in the first week of September. The club had its heyday in the 1960s, when it produced a string of talented young players. It was in the era before the transfer market took off, when commercialism had yet to take hold in the game. In 1964, the club's manager Ron Greenwood had taken the F.A. Cup trophy home on a London “tube” train wrapped in cloth after the Hammers had beaten Preston North End in the final. Two years later, three members of his team – Bobby Moore, Geoff Hurst and Martin Peters – helped England win the World Cup, snapping the dominance of Pelé and Brazil.

However, West Ham had dropped out of the Premier League in 2003, the same year that Roman Abramovich had bought Chelsea and – although it returned two years later and continued to produce talented players – it did not have the financial clout to compete with the biggest English clubs. Its latest generation of talented players – such as Rio Ferdinand, Frank Lampard and Joe Cole – had one by one left for bigger-spending clubs. The club's song, I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles, featuring the line “fortune's always hiding” was now more apt than ever. When Scudamore travelled there for a scheduled meeting in 2007, the club was trying to avoid relegation again.

Scudamore's car made its way down Green Street, where pie-and-mash restaurants stand next to shops selling Indian saris and samosas. Scudamore darted out of the car and strode into the club's offices to be welcomed by team managing director Paul Aldridge, who apologized for the absence of the owner, Terry Brown. Scudamore wasted no time, getting straight to the point of his visit. “These players, what's the story? How have they got here?” he snapped.

A few days earlier, in late August 2006, Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano had themselves arrived at West Ham. Flanking Alan Pardew, the Argentine stars held up claret and blue shirts and smiled for the media. How on earth had this struggling Premier League team managed to sign two of the world's most sought-after players? The story has its roots in South America, but was also tied to the riches that accompanied the breakup of the Soviet Union and an Israeli dealmaker called Pini Zahavi, who was never far away from football's biggest transfers.

Scudamore was already aware of wealthy individuals buying the transfer rights of players as early as 2000, a year after he took the job at the Premier League. Zahavi had told him all about it.

Zahavi was a suave and smooth-talking Israeli who had parlayed a career as a football journalist in his native Israel into a transfer broker. His first deal, while still working as a reporter, had been to take Avi Cohen to Liverpool from Maccabi Tel Aviv in 1979. After 20 years as an agent, he had turned his attention to acting as a dealmaker to help a small group of wealthy individuals, some of them from the former Soviet Union, to invest in the transfer market. He called the business Soccer Investments & Representations, or S.I.R. for short.

Zahavi's office was on a tree-lined boulevard near the Mediterranean ocean in Tel Aviv, but he spent much of his working life in five-star hotels across the globe or in his apartment in London's Marble Arch. He had learnt how this South American business model worked from his partners in Argentina: Fernando Hidalgo and Gustavo Arribas. Together they had founded the HAZ agency, which took its name from the first letters of their surnames and used a series of companies domiciled in Gibraltar, Luxembourg and Malta to buy and sell transfer rights. The business was so successful that the trio set up their own motor-racing team in 2006, and even considered entering the USA's high-profile Nascar series before one of its drivers died in a 200 km/hr crash at the Autódromo Juan Manuel Fangio on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. The sudden and shocking death had ended their appetite to pursue the racing adventure.

Zahavi was well known in the Premier League's offices in London. At Christmas he would freight a box of oranges to Scudamore from back home. Over a cup of tea one day, Zahavi told Scudamore that he was moving into owning transfer rights. “He said I'm not an agent anymore I own players: I actually own them,” Scudamore recalled. “That's the future.”

In 2001, Zahavi had helped Gustavo Mascardi, the first registered FIFA agent in Argentina, earn as much as half of the $12 million transfer fee Aston Villa paid River Plate for Juan Pablo Ángel. Mascardi owned 50% of the Colombian striker's transfer rights through a company called “Siglo XXI” (Twenty-First Century). Aston Villa almost pulled out of the deal at the last minute after hearing of the unorthodox arrangement, but in the end the signing went ahead.

In the spring of 2003, Zahavi was introduced by another football agent, Jonathan Barnett, to Chelsea chief executive Trevor Birch at Les Ambassadeurs, a private club in London's Mayfair, in a move that would help him – with his contacts in the former Soviet Union – become a broker in the takeover of the then struggling club.

While Zahavi and Barnett loved the high life, fine clothes and trappings of success – like Les Ambassadeurs, which served French champagne, Belgian chocolates and Cuban cigars – Birch was a more low-key character. He had a first-class degree in accountancy from Liverpool Polytechnic and specialized in corporate restructuring. He was an employee of Ken Bates, a gruff Londoner who had bought Chelsea for £1 in 1982.

Birch had briefed Zahavi on Chelsea's financial woes, how it could barely pay the players' salaries and how Bates wanted to sell up. The Israeli relayed the information to Abramovich. A few weeks later the Russian billionaire, dressed in jeans and accompanied by a Citibank banker and attorney from Skadden Arps law firm, came to meet Birch in one of the executive boxes overlooking the pitch at Stamford Bridge stadium. The rendezvous lasted less than an hour and ended with an outline for a deal, which was agreed on a handshake.

Chelsea's executives were stunned by how fast the Russian was moving. They did a Google search on his name but little came up. Still, he seemed to be bona fide and his advisors clearly worked for serious organizations. Three weeks later, on 1 July 2003, contracts were signed and Abramovich became the first Russian owner of a Premier League club.

Three years later, two more oligarchs who had been close to Abramovich became involved in the Premier League via a different route. Boris Berezovsky and Arkady “Badri” Patarkatsishvili took control of the transfer rights of Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano through a series of offshore companies and their aides arranged for the Argentines to join West Ham.

According to The Observer newspaper, which secured a rare interview with Zahavi that year, the Israeli acted as an advisor to West Ham in the deal just as he had done for Abramovich in his acquisition of Chelsea.

Berezovsky, a mathematician, had built his fortune after the fall of the Soviet Union by investing in Lada cars and Aeroflot planes. After surviving a car bomb that decapitated his driver during Russia's often-violent transition from communism, he masterminded Vladimir Putin's rise to power in 2000. But once the Russian president was in power, he vowed to get rid of the oligarchs for meddling in politics, forcing Berezovsky and Patarkatsishvili to flee to the UK with their fortunes.

Initially, the exiled oligarchs' link to the two Argentine players was not known. West Ham did not disclose the terms of the agreement, instead employing the clichéd patter of English football. The Hammers said that Tevez and Mascherano had “put pen to paper” on permanent contracts and all other details would remain confidential.

However, there was more going on behind the scenes. A couple of days earlier, West Ham's legal and commercial director, Scott Duxbury, had called Premier League secretary Jane Purdon to make an enquiry about the possibility of signing two players whose transfer rights were owned by offshore companies. The companies, Duxbury said, wanted the players to join West Ham free of charge should the club agree to allow them freedom to move them on. Purdon, a bespectacled lawyer from Sunderland, said the arrangement would breach league rules that forbade any third party having influence over the buying or selling of players. She advised Duxbury against the transaction.

The next day, Purdon spoke to him again and asked if there were any third parties involved in the signings. Duxbury ducked that question, according to Purdon's comments in the minutes of a Premier League hearing. “He did not say yes, he did not say no,” Purdon recalled. “He merely replied that all documents required for registration had been provided. In doing so, he was in the belief that no rule had been broken.”

When Scudamore personally went to West Ham to hear the club's version of events, Aldridge sought to calm him. He said there was nothing untoward. Investors were going to buy the club and therefore they were just placing these players there in anticipation of the forthcoming sale.

Scudamore, whose organization had no power to raid the club's files, went back to the Premier League's office and fumed. “When you've worked with these people for so long, when you've looked them in the eye and asked them a direct question, you get a direct answer,” Scudamore said. “There's really not a lot more you can do.”

If the oligarchs had been passive investors in the two players, West Ham would have complied with the rules, but it would become clear that they had complete control over the next transfer of the Argentines. According to the Premier League rules, that was not allowed. Third parties could not acquire the right to “influence” the policies or performance of teams.

The British Virgin Islands-based companies that controlled where the Argentines played next were owned by Patarkatsishvili, although Berezovsky said they were a joint venture with him under a series of gentleman's agreements they had embarked on together. They had previously held stakes in a Russian car dealership, oil company Sibneft and the Kommersant newspaper.

The two men now lived in exile, in mansions a 20-minute drive from each other in the Surrey commuter belt west of London. Berezovsky lived in Ascot, in an ivy-clad home with its own lake and manicured lawn. Patarkatsishvili, with his distinctive white handlebar moustache, resided in an even grander pile with chandeliers, gold fittings and ornate sculptures.

Under the deal that the two oligarchs had financed, West Ham would be a temporary home for Carlos Tevez. The club, which was founded by workers from a shipyard at the end of the 19th century, would get £2 million should he be transferred in the January transfer window three months later. After that, the compensation would fall to £100,000. West Ham would get £150,000 on the transfer of Mascherano.

Patarkatsishvili had appointed a young businessman to head up their football operation. Kia Joorabchian was raised in the UK and had previously helped his Iranian father run car dealerships in Essex and Kent. In what Time magazine called a “surreal” sale, the businessman in his early 30s was part of an offshore group that battled with Berezovsky for control of Kommersant. According to Joorabchian's version of events, he sued the oligarch over the sale before they agreed to settle out of court. “That's how I met Boris Berezovsky,” he said.

Joorabchian then moved to São Paulo to manage Corinthians, one of Brazil's biggest football clubs, on behalf of the oligarchs. Patarkatsishvili's London-based Media Sports Investments (MSI) had agreed to pay $35 million to take control of the team for 10 years in return for a share of the team's profits from marketing and buying and selling players. As part of the deal, MSI would get 51% of the net profit from television revenue, sponsorships and ticket sales, and 80% of transfer fees. Joorabchian hired Tevez and Mascherano from Boca Juniors and River Plate, respectively.

Tevez's arrival thrilled Corinthian fans, who were surprised that such a big-name player had arrived on their doorstep. At $16 million he was the most expensive player ever signed by a Brazilian club. He delighted them with a never-say-die attitude that yielded 46 goals in 78 games. Tevez would celebrate each goal enthusiastically, at one point pulling a dummy from his sock and sucking on it to mark the birth of his child.

Using the wealth of the oligarchs, Corinthians went shopping in European football and added other prominent players to its squad, including Nilmar from Lyon, Gustavo Nery from Werder Bremen and Carlos Alberto Gomes de Jésus from Porto. The team swept to the Brazilian league title.

With Tevez's form pushing up his market price and triggering interest from clubs abroad, Joorabchian's job was to extract the highest possible fee for the investment fund's biggest asset. He announced that the striker would only leave Corinthians if another team paid the release clause in his contract of between £69 million and £83 million. Even the lowest amount would have been a world record transfer fee. There was no suitor willing to hand over such an enormous sum, and so he ended up at West Ham.

The memory of the Tevez and Mascherano affair remains painful for Scudamore a decade later. “I can give you dates, I can give you times,” said Scudamore, sitting at a table in his glass office that looks out at the Premier League's headquarters in a smart townhouse in London's West End. The office, with a small plaque next to the black front door, could pass for that of a law firm or accountancy practice.

In Scudamore's opinion, West Ham executives broke the rules because they were blinded by the possibility of deep-pocketed owners buying the club. “What was more tantalizing was the acquisition of the club” as opposed to the Argentine stars, Scudamore said. West Ham officials were probably “just so wrapped up in the idea of new owners, and becoming key in the new ownership structure”.

In the end, neither Patarkatsishvili nor Berezovsky bought West Ham. A few weeks later, owner Terry Brown sold his majority stake in the club to a group from Iceland. Mascherano was traded to Liverpool, earning the oligarchs £18 million. A Premier League panel then issued West Ham with a record fine of £5.5 million, though it stopped short of handing down a point deduction.

To Scudamore's horror, the fallout continued. As the season reached its climax, Tevez found his form to boost West Ham's battle to avoid relegation. The Argentine scored seven goals in the last 10 games of the season, including the only one in a 1-0 win on the last day of the season at Manchester United, which kept West Ham in the top division. Tevez's goal meant that Sheffield United was relegated instead, and its coach Neil Warnock raged that Scudamore should be fired.

That single goal by Tevez made the affair “seismic rather than containable”, Scudamore said. Sheffield United immediately challenged the Premier League's decision not to dock points from West Ham.

As the scandal was unfurling, Berezovsky was wrestling with dark thoughts at his home in London's commuter belt. He was feeling glum about how he had to flee Russia and had fallen out with Abramovich, who he felt had forced him into selling his oil company Sibneft below the market price. While the Chelsea owner had left Russia on a high, the former mathematician was pushed out of his country against his will. Now Abramovich, a high-school dropout, was the 15th wealthiest person in the world – worth $24 billion according to Forbes magazine – and had just led Chelsea to its first English league title in half a century, endearing himself to fans. Berezovsky was at 897th on the rich list, with $1.3 billion.

Berezovsky could console himself that he was on course to make more money from football. Abramovich's Chelsea had not posted a profit in each of the five years since he took charge. The London club was haemorrhaging money in the race to win trophies: in the year to June 2007 alone, Abramovich had to soak up its loss of £75 million.

Berezovzky's bet with Patarkatsishvili to buy Brazil's Corinthians was much cheaper and, despite the Premier League hullabaloo with the Tevez affair, they were now on course to turn a handsome profit by trading him for many times the $16 million they paid for him.

Still, this was not enough to lift him from his gloom. To try and claw away at some of his former ally's fortune, Berezovsky decided he would sue Abramovich over the sale of Sibneft at London's High Court. He would pursue $6 billion of his wealth.

Waiting for his moment, he carried a writ in his chauffeur-driven Maybach limousine to serve on Abramovich. One day, while shopping in Dolce & Gabbana in London's Sloane Street, Berezovsky spotted him in Hermès, another luxury store. After sneaking past Abramovich's bodyguards guarding the door of the shop, Berezovsky thrust the document in front of the startled oligarch, saying “I've got a present for you”. Abramovich pulled his hands away and the paper fell to the floor. Berezovsky said the meeting was like a scene from The Godfather movie.

Meanwhile, the Tevez scandal rolled on until West Ham agreed to pay Sheffield United £18 million in compensation to settle the dispute almost a year later. Scudamore had already taken steps to make sure that such a case would never happen again. Seven years after chatting with Pini Zahavi over tea regarding the “future” of player trading, the Premier League boss had acted to stiffen the rules on outside investment in the transfer market. He banned third parties acquiring a stake in the transfer rights of players – even if it was a passive investment. The business model “raises too many issues over the integrity of competition and the development of young players”, a Premier League spokesman said. “No-one wants to see what has happened to club football in South America repeated over here.”

Patarkatsishvili's offshore companies were allowed to unwind their stakes in the rights of Tevez. They collected £9 million from loaning the striker to Manchester United for two seasons, and a further £45 million when he was transferred to Manchester City on a permanent contract in 2009.

However, the Georgian billionaire didn't live to collect his windfall. A year earlier, Patarkatsishvili had collapsed and died after dinner at his mansion in Leatherhead, aged 52. Berezovsky, who had spent the day in meetings with his friend in London, came rushing from his home when he heard the news, but police had cordoned off the mansion and would not let him in. Police would initially describe the death as suspicious, although a post mortem found that he died of a heart attack.

The Russian wept as he relayed the news of the death of his friend. “He was like my father, brother and son – all at the same time,” Berezovsky told Vanity Fair magazine. Because their 50-50 deals were sealed on a handshake, Berezovsky now faced a fight for a share in the dead Georgian's sprawling empire. He filed a lawsuit claiming half of the $3 billion assets he left, including the company that owned Carlos Tevez's transfer rights, which had garnered £54 million.

In late 2012, Berezovsky settled out of court with Patarkatsishvili's widow Inna and her family. A few weeks earlier he had lost his lawsuit against Abramovich. On the hook for hefty legal bills from both cases, his fortune had dwindled and his status as a billionaire had vanished. The following year Berezovsky was found hanged in a bathroom at his mansion by his bodyguard. According to the insolvency division at the same High Court in London where he had duelled with Abramovich, he left debts of £300 million.