It doesn’t look great but I didn’t do wrong, says Hasselbaink as Belgian chairman quits

JIMMY FLOYD HASSELBAINK yesterday admitted “it doesn’t look great”, after he was named in the Telegraph’s undercover football exposé.

Hasselbaink said that he had been “naïve” when he agreed to be paid £55,000 to fly to Singapore and make a speech to investors in a fictitious Far East firm, but insisted he had done nothing wrong.

The Queens Park Rangers manager was told that the company wanted to become involved in the transfer of players. But the Championship manager saw that as no barrier to working with the firm, and was open to the idea of signing players they represented, despite the apparent conflict of interest with his job at QPR.

Hasselbaink said yesterday: “You reflect, you think back and you criticise yourself and you must say that I have been naïve. But then, with everything with it, I have never asked for money for myself to take a player or to bring a player to the club. I would never do that. That’s the painful thing about it.”

Yesterday, the chairman of a Belgian football club stepped down after the Telegraph disclosed how he had offered his team as a conduit to help the same fictitious investment company own players in England, in an apparent breach of Fifa rules.

Jimmy Houtput, who was chairman of Oud-Heverlee Leuven, had told an undercover reporter that the club would be willing to pose as the owner of footballers whose economic rights would be held by the fake company.

He denied offering to help break rules and said his decision should “in no way be seen as an admission of guilt”, but was instead “the result of an accumulation of disappointments that are much broader”. Houtput’s resigna- tion follows that of England manager Sam Allardyce on Tuesday. Tommy Wright was fired as assistant manager at Barnsley on Thursday, while Southampton assistant manager Eric Black has denied allegations that he gave advice on paying coaches at other clubs.

QPR said it had suspended investigations into Hasselbaink while it awaited the unedited transcripts and video footage of his meeting with agent Scott McGarvey and an undercover reporter. In a statement, the director of football, Les Ferdinand, said QPR had a “robust” transfer system in place, and described it as a “joint process with myself, the scouts and Jimmy”.

“If we do like what we see, then we go ahead with the deal and I contact the agent and I do all the workings with the agent. Jimmy never gets involved in that part of it,” he said.