The chairman of the Football Association Greg Clarke has defended the use of an undercover sting by the Daily Telegraph against former England manager Sam Allardyce.
Allardyce said: “Entrapment has won on this occasion”, when he spoke to reporters yesterday.
Undercover journalists posing as businesmen offered Allardyce £100,000-per-trip to talk to investors in the Far East. He also talked about how to get around FA rules banning third-party companies owning a share in players.
Speaking after the resignation of Allardyce, Clarke said: “Where you don’t have an inquisitive, free press, very dark things happen in corners of the world which are hidden. There is nothing wrong with using what techniques you have to use to expose wrongdoing.”
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Acting chairman of the Commons culture committee Damian Collins said: “Allardyce’s point about entrapment totally misses the point, because if it wasn’t for these sorts of investigations the truth would never out.
“Football is incapable of investigating itself. I would much rather undercover reporters get these stories into the light of day.”
Today the Telegraph published a third day of revelations about UK football as a result of its ten-month investigation.
It revealed that an assistant manager of Championship football club Barnsley had accepted a £5,000 payment from a reporter posing as a businessman to apparently help him profit from player transfers.
And it filmed Queens Park Rangers manager Jimmy Floyd Hasselbank negotiating a £55,000 fee to fly Singapore to speak to investors seeking to be involved in the transfer of players.
Hasselbank said there was nothing unusual about agreeing to make a speech and said he had done nothing wrong.
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