BBC And Panorama Football’s Dirty Secrets: Job Only Half Done?
Let’s just say it’s been an entertaining hours’ viewing if nothing else although after all of the hype surrounding Panorama’s Football’s Dirty Secrets programme I really thought they would have had more real evidence and been able to make a real difference in cleaning up football at the highest level in England.
Sam Allardyce may well be sweating over what the next few days and weeks will bring for him after being outed as the main man for allegedly taking bungs or arranging for his son, football agent Craig, to take a bung while involved in transfer dealings with his dad’s employers, Bolton Wanderers. Agents Teni Yerima and Peter Harrison have been the main men on their side of the fence implicated and neither can honestly believe that their claims after being caught on camera saying that they could arrange illegal payments with many high ranking football managers will be ignored by the authorities simply because they are now claiming to have made everything up.
Harry Redknapp’s involvement in the show was also something of a let down as he merely alluded on camera that he would be interested in signing Blackburn Rovers defender Andy Todd, which is an infringement of the rules but hardly earth shattering in the scale of football corruption scandals that we’d been led to believe.
Harry’s former assistant, Kevin Bond, now with Newcastle United, came out a little worse after admitting in a recorded phone conversation that he and Harry would discuss the level of financial payoff they would like to receive from doing player transfers with the fictitious agency set up by Panorama.
Aside from Sam Allardyce’s continued involvement and mentions from the aforementioned corrupt agents, it was the camera footage of Chelsea youth team scout Frank Arnesen negotiating an illegal payment for a 15 year old Middlesbrough defender that really caught the eye. After the Ashley Cole saga last season Chelsea have a suspended sentence of a 3 point deduction hanging over them and surely this footage violates the terms on which they have been allowed to keep those points? As a Spurs fan I can only wonder at the kind of dealings Mr Arnesen did in our name when he revamped the playing squad in his time as Sporting Director a couple of summers ago.
Liverpool were another high profile club implicated in the illegal tapping up of the young Middlesbrough defender Nathan Porritt, the same player offered to Chelsea behind his club’s back by agent Peter Harrison.
The fact that so many clubs’, players’ and managers’ names were beeped out and censored shows just how sensitive the BBC have had to be about legal issues and with this in mind the Panorama programme sort of fizzled out rather than exploded the corrupt football world apart. We all know it goes on and when the industry closes ranks as well as it does it’s not likely that we’ll get to hear the full story any time soon.
Panorama scratched the surface but whether it ends Sam Allardyce’s career or that of any of the agents exposed within it remains to be seen.
About the author Alan Hylands
Alan is both a former SOTG editor and former World Soccer editor at the New York Times Company. Football-wise, he wishes he was a younger lovechild of Glenn Hoddle and Diego Maradona (not the short, fat, cokehead, religious nut bit obviously...)
Follow me on Twitter: sotgfootball
Hi Alan, I thought I’d give Panorama a go after getting bored / frustrated with my teams attempts at progressing to the next stage of the carling cup but found I was bored with that too.
I kept waiting for this evidence that was going to surface about bungs but it didn’t, just bravado and innuendo fromsome opportunist agents trying to make some more cash.
Can’t see Sam getting the push, in fact I can see the Panorama team getting the push before him!
Think the tapping up videos were more worthy of a program, but it seems so depressingly common that you wonder if there’s any point in having rules at all. Clearly managers and agents are talking all the time about players (as you’d expect), but when does it cross the line and become an issue?