Quinn doubts FA will step up

In the movie The Big Short, a group of stock analysts made a lot of money by betting against the bubble that was the American subprime housing market about 10 years ago. If the same fellas are still around I wouldn’t be surprised if they are watching the Premier League football bubble.

The game at the top end is definitely in a bubble, the incredible TV packages and current wage demands tell us that.

If the TV rights war plateaus, is English football prepared for a slowdown? Are there wage structures and strict ownership regulations and a sane transfer system in place? Is the game corruption free?

The last week has brought the game in England to a crossroads. I’m not sure it wanted to get to that crossroads but which direction it takes now will be very interesting.

When Shakespeare said: “That a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” the people who run football weren’t paying attention. Last year it was decided that agents (boo, hiss) would no longer exist. Football would have ‘intermediaries’ instead.

Intermediaries. They sound like social workers. Good generous souls who bring harmony to places where there was none. There would be no more of the regulation that agents had to go through. Anybody who felt the calling could be an intermediary. You can go online and become an intermediary yourself if you are at a loose end.

Just over a year after agents became intermediaries the FA finds itself having to sack an England manager who had one match under his belt. It’s a fine mess.

I know Sam Allardyce and his family a very long time and consider him a friend. He is good company and a funny story teller. He likes to dominate a conversation and he has a tendency to big himself up. I know a lot of agents (or intermediaries) too and as a breed they have that same trait. If you need a player who can defy gravity the agent will just happen to have Superman’s nephew on his books. But you need him to play up to sixty games a year you say? “No problem, his mother’s brother is Wolverine. He heals instantly this lad.”

And if Sam were in the conversation he would chip in that he’d had Wolverine as a youngster at Bolton but he got rid of him because Wolverine wouldn’t track back.

So, it’s not really the stuff of Woodward and Bernstein, the Watergate reporters, to secretly film football people and agents talking big over drinks, but that’s a discussion for journalists to have. I genuinely hope that conversation happens and that the media step up their scrutiny of our game.

I think the FA were right to give Sam his cards. As a manager of the national team he should have known better. Would a reprimand and an apology not have done? I don’t think so, and Sam, unfortunately, chose to dilute his apology by blaming “entrapment” for his misfortune. There should have been nothing for anybody to entrap him with. It was a conversation that should never have happened.

When I arrived in England years ago the …

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