Football and It's Bungs

I'll try and make this as coherent as possible but it might come out as a stream of consciousness that makes no sense.

Twenty five years ago I had a friend who was the secretary to the chairman at a football league club. One day the Chairman arrived back early from his holiday and found a brown jiffy bag on his desk, when he opened it he found £25,000 in used fivers. The envelope had the name of the club's manager on the front and when confronted about it the manager confessed that the money was from a club in Hong Kong that had recently signed the club's leading scorer - much to the surprise of the fans who believed the player was going to help promote the club - and was his cut of the transfer fee.

The manager was sacked on the spot, he later returned to football at a club about one hundred and fifty miles away - where he had two spells as a manager and a brief spell as a director of football.

Now the point is, after he was sacked the club turned to a former player who was back in the area after a spell aborad and asked him to be the new manager. This person and the sacked manager were close friends and in his autobiography he claims that his predecessor left the club by mutual consent after he was told that the club didn't have any money available for transfers - well they nearly had £25,000 less than they should have!

This story isn't just an urban myth, I know two other people who know the same story whom I had no social or professional connection with at the time the events took place and this morning, in the light of the Panorama programme, a colleague who knows two people who work in the Sports Science Industry has told me that the person who covered up the truth in his autobirography has something of a reputation for this sort of thing but because of friends in the media has kept it quiet.

Unfortunately none of this will ever make the back, front or inside pages because the old Chairman died several years ago and the sacked manager is no longer involved in football.

There, that's out - hope it makes some sort of sense.