It’s not just Big Sam – the game itself needs to change
Last week’s Telegraph investigation shed light on the festering cesspool of greed that lies at the heart of English football
For some in the game, the words Far Eastern and businessmen are cat nip Sam Allardyce negotiated £400k deal to “get around” FA transfer rules Eight current and former Premier League managers took transfer “bungs” Players illicitly gambled on the result of one of their own games
Sam Allardyce’s final public outing as England football manager was spent surrounded by journalists. He was the guest of honour at the Footballer Writers’ Association golf day on Monday, and was enjoying joshing with the scribes as he made his way down the fairways at Stoke Park in Buckinghamshire. Full of hail-fellow-well-met bonhomie, there was no sense as he pitched and putted that he felt anything other than confident, optimistic. This, after all, was one of the happy perks of holding the most distinguished position in his profession, the job he had coveted all his working life.
As he arrived at the 14th green, however, his mobile rang. It was a representative of The Telegraph informing him that the two men he had recently met, a pair he thought were directors of a Far Eastern consortium looking to invest in English football, were in fact undercover reporters. Without completing his round, he left to deal with the issue. At that time he was leading in the longest drive-of-the-day competition. He went off without claiming his reward.
One thing about the week’s stunning turn of events cannot be over-stated: Allardyce was brought down by his own greed. He wasn’t hounded out of office, he was not – as he forlornly suggested – a victim of entrapment. The reason he was removed as England manager was that he willingly provided information that would assist in the circumvention of his own employer’s rules, while negotiating a commercial deal. As breaches of contracts go, that is pretty clear cut.
But what is most depressing about the whole episode is not so much Allardyce’s misjudgment. Together with the other revelations in The
Telegraph of widespread graft, it is the light it sheds on the cesspool that is at the heart of English football.
Allardyce is clearly the most significant exposure. The man who, when he was appointed England manager back in July, gushed about the dignity and responsibility of the role, was, within days, proved to have been seeking ways to monetise his position. Following the money, he was introduced by an old friend to a couple of reporters posing as Far Eastern businessmen. For some within football, those three words – Far Eastern and businessmen – are cat nip. There is a torrent of cash heading this way from the East, as businessmen seek a stake in the gold rush of the English Premier League. In the past year, the Chinese have purchased three senior football clubs in the West Midlands alone. After the first meeting with the supposed businessmen, Allardyce’s agent Mark Curtis – who he had brought along for moral support – expressed misgivings. But Allardyce ignored Curtis’s counsel and went to a second meeting without him. Bewitched by the idea that some Chinese bounty might be heading his way, refreshed by a pint or two of chardonnay, he portrayed himself as some sort of footballing Tony Blair, blustering about telephone number fees for keynote addresses.
Self-aggrandisement, though, is not a sackable offence. What undermined him was his willingness to help these supposed businessmen skip round the rules of third-party ownership, brought in by the FA in an attempt to bring some clarity to the transfer system. As George Bernard Shaw might have put it, it was this that established what kind of man Sam Allardyce is. If he is prepared to discuss such a thing with people he had only just met, what else might he be prepared to do? That was his undoing.
When the findings were made public, Allardyce’s first instinct was to blather it out. But his superiors at the FA – the newly appointed chairman Greg Clarke and the chief executive Martin Glenn – realised the meaning of his transgression. Theirs is an organisation that had lectured Fifa on its inadequate responses to corrupt practices, and here they were with their principal employee right under their noses seemingly happy to flog himself to those seeking to break the rules. He had to go.
Not that everyone felt this was the proper decision. The Times columnist Matthew Syed led a chorus of disapproval. This was an unscrupulous sting, he wrote; the FA should have stood by its man. But what Syed preferred to downplay is the fact that nobody forced Allardyce to put his soul up to the highest bidder. All he needed do was say no. And you would have thought being paid £3 million a year might have insulated him from the need to seek more. But this is the point: in football, more is never enough.
And the sad truth about English football is that Allardyce is by no means alone in his unabashed, showme-the-money attitude. After a 10month investigation, The Telegraph showed that wrongdoing has been taking place across the business, among agents, among managers, in the case of Leeds United’s chairman Massimo Cellino, among club owners. Some names may not be as renowned as that of the now ex-England boss. But that does not matter. The scale of the revelations indicates how commonplace it is. Since they were unveiled, everyone from footballing greats like Alan Shearer and Gary Lineker, through politicians like Tracey Crouch and Karen Bradley to the FA’s own Clarke and Glenn, have suggested the need for a full inquiry. The police have now sought access to The Telegraph’s evidence, which the editor has handed over. But as it uncovered pervasive malfeasance, the probe also demonstrated something else about the game: how ineffective its own investigative procedures are. Those in charge of regulation have neither the power nor the financial support to investigate properly; the FA is an entirely reactive organisation. Sure, it acted quickly once his duplicity was revealed, but without The Telegraph intervention, Allardyce would have still been England manager this weekend.
It has been ever thus. The bung culture of the mid-Nineties was revealed by tabloid inquiry; the corruption at Fifa was exposed by reporter Andrew Jennings; The Guardian last week reported the links between former council officials and enforced redevelopment plans at Millwall FC. Yet, as is clear in every new player contract, this is not a business short of money. The trouble is, little of its booty is properly applied. Preoccupied with sticking its nose in the trough, football as a whole has little understanding of how to invest to sustain itself for the long haul.
Here is a statistic that indicates precisely the inverted values that obtain at the top of our national game. Between October 1 2015 and February 1 2016, the 20 English Premier League clubs paid out £46,582,843 in agents’ fees. That means in just four months, enough money was siphoned out of the system to pay for 130 new floodlit, all-weather pitches for our schools. Money that could build a worldbeating infrastructure was handed over to sustain the Ferrari lifestyles of those who contribute nothing to the development of the sport.
It is not just individuals like Sam Allardyce who need to change. It is the priorities of the game itself.