PAUL DAVIDSON, multi-millionaire manufacturer, was looking for a club to buy. He cast his eye up and down the Premier League. “Yeah, I did think about a club in England,” he says, “for all of 30 seconds.” In the space of little more than a weekend, the Englishman committed himself to become the new owner of Real Mallorca, of the Spanish first division.

Provided Davidson is happy after the due diligence process, this 55-year-old Lancastrian will next season stir in La Liga the sort of debate that surrounded the takeover of the likes of Chelsea, Manchester United, Liverpool and Aston Villa by foreign owners. He will become Spain’s most prominent. “I’d say 99% of fans here are really pleased,” says Paco Soto, head of the Aviacion pena, a supporters’ club. “The club needs money, looked for a local buyer and couldn’t find one. Okay, when he says we’re going to win the Champions League, that’s probably just the euphoria of clinching the deal, but we can become competitive in Europe.”

Davidson talks a good game, has a nice line in self-made-millionaire caricature - “I’ve got the blonde, I’ve got the Bentley” - and when he talks about Mallorca participating in Europe’s most lucrative competition, he is not making wild projections. He will pay around £40m for a 92% stake in a club that has been involved in the Champions League more recently than, say, Tottenham and has won more domestic cups this side of the millennium than, say, Everton.

“I saw the Mallorca people on the Friday and agreed the deal the following Monday,” he said. “The problem with the Premier League is that the top four places, and getting into the Champions League, are almost guaranteed and in the long-term that’s a recipe for disaster. There should be a playoff for fourth; at the moment it’s a like a grand prix where the front four start ahead on the grid. Here, that’s not true.” Since 2000, Real Mallorca, Celta Vigo, Real Betis, Sevilla, Deportivo La Coruña, Villarreal, Osasuna, Real Sociedad, Valencia and Atletico Madrid have all qualified for the Champions League, usually accompanied by Real Madrid and Barcelona. In the same period, only Newcastle United and Leeds United have interrupted the quartet of Manchester United, Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool going into the group stages.

Davidson, who left school at 15 to train as a plumber, found the sums attractive. He made, and makes, his money from the manufacture of pipes. Spain is a major market. “When I’ve a new product to launch, I spend six or seven million on marketing. If I’ve got a football club promoting that product, or my company, I’ll hardly need to do that.” Mallorca, who finished seventh last season, would be lifted in the process. “It’s a terrific family club, but it needs commercialising. We’ve also got a big British, German and Dutch population on the island, so we’ll get a great big boozer going near the ground and bring more of them in.”

Davidson insists he’s a football fan more than a football man. “What I do have is the ability to make money very quickly, but what do I know about football? That’s why the president, Vicente Grande, is staying on and I’m getting a top chief executive from an English club in.” And, yes, he hoped to recruit British players, too, though primarily at academy level. “Once we identify promising 16-and 17-year-olds in England, we can say to them, ‘Where would you prefer to do your apprenticeship? Here in Mallorca, where you’ll play in La Liga, in the sun and learning Spanish, or in, say, Leeds? There’s also the importation laws for players from South America that are different in Spain than in England, so we can bring them in.”

The supporters approve. “We’ve always a been a trampoline club for good players,” says Soto. “They come here, improve and we sell them for a big profit. Davidson seems to have good ideas, and we need an investor. And I don’t think he’s another Piterman.” That would be Dmitry Piterman, Spanish football’s most notorious foreign owner, a Ukrainian-American who has taken over, by turns, Racing Santander and Alaves, without success and at one stage appointed himself head coach and sat on the bench.

Paul ‘The Plumber’ Davidson will not do that. “I’ll be in the stands, not even in the posh seats, moaning like everyone else when we lose. I don’t want to be the guy who gets dogshit sent to him in the post.”