Harry's Games by John Crace Page B

since the breakaway by the First Division clubs from the Football League to form the Premier League in 1992,’ he said. ‘The Premier League set up the Quest inquiry in 2006 after agents themselves, including Jon Holmes, one of the first and most respected, described football’s player transfer business as “like the wild west”. Mike Newell, then Luton Town’s manager, said publicly that bungs were rife. The former England manager, Sven-Göran Eriksson, was also caught in a
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“fake sheikh” sting on a yacht, saying, among several other indiscretions, that Premier League managers “put money in their pockets”.
    â€˜The claims had credence, because even before the billions from Sky TV and the Premier League’s commercial revolution, bungs were indeed proven to have been paid. A previous, much more dogged Premier League inquiry – ultimately signed off in 1997 by Robert Reid QC and the league’s then chief executive, Rick Parry – found that after Arsenal signed the Danish midfield international John Jensen, and the Norwegian full-back Pal Lydersen in 1991 and 1992, Arsenal’s manager, George Graham, was paid £425,000 in kickbacks or ‘bungs’ (payments to football managers from agents as ‘thank-yous’ for signing their players) by the players’ Norwegian agent, Rune Hauge. They also concluded that £50,000 in cash had been handed to Ronnie Fenton, assistant to Brian Clough, one of English football’s greatest managers, after Clough sold the striker Teddy Sheringham to Tottenham Hotspur in August 1992. Graham was sacked as Arsenal’s manager and suspended from football for a year. Clough and Fenton were charged by the Football Association with misconduct for other alleged transfer kickbacks, but Clough was spared due to his deteriorating health, and Fenton retired to Malta.’
    That practice – of managers wanting a bung out of transfer fees – is often explained by football managers having always beeninsecure and not well paid in pre-Premier League days; it might now be termed ‘old school’. Quest was tasked with examining all 362 transfers of players in and out of Premier League clubs between January 2004–06, ‘specifically to identify . . . unauthorized or fraudulent payments’. Its investigators produced a report in June 2007 which named some high-profile football agents for alleged lack of cooperation and said seventeen of the deals could not be ‘signed off’. But on close reading, the Premier League’s report exonerated every manager and club official in the Premier League of taking bungs. Redknapp’s revelation in court that ‘quite a few’ managers did not volunteer their bank details to Quest, as he had done – including, fatefully, his Monaco account – cast the rigour of the Premier League’s self-inquiry in a new light.
    Conn went on to explain that the City of London Police also hardly came up smelling of roses. ‘The City of London Police is the UK’s lead force for financial crime, a status some experts describe as its justification for remaining independent of Greater London’s Metropolitan Police. The force is part-funded by the banks themselves in the City’s square mile; £4.9 million in 2010–11 came from its police authority, the Corporation of London. Throughout the serial multi-billion-pound collapses of banks around it, which have cost the taxpayer trillions, the City of London Police has arrested no senior banker for any suspected offence. The force has, though, become expensively involved in horse-racing and football.
    â€˜In December 2007, the trial of former champion jockey Kieren Fallon and five other men for alleged race-fixing collapsed, their lawyers accusing the City of London Police of a flawed investigation.’ By then, Conn explained, in 2006, Operation Apprentice had begun and had