Others on Corruptions in Football

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The Times - Simon Barnes
'Sheikh' reveals real problems

". ..... The issue is not Eriksson, the issue is corruption. .... What is surprising is not that the corruption exists but that people are beginning to talk about corruption. And this brings a growing public sense of dismay. If we must have our attention drawn to such matters, then we would like to see something done. And that — most emphatically — does not mean an FA committee of inquiry, to be launched some time in the future, headed by some nice old boy with a brief to come up with three tenths of bugger all. Nor does it mean a committee to look into Eriksson’s gossip and how much he can substantiate it. He can’t substantiate it at all. He is just accustomed to working in a corrupt business, a business in which backhanders are the way the world wags. Everybody’s doing it, so I’d be a fool not to. I don’t want to be ostracised. I want to be part of football, therefore I have to be part of corruption.
Ian Holloway, the Queens Park Rangers manager, is wriggling like an eel in his attempt to distance himself from the whistleblower tag, but all the same he had it all perfectly when he said that he loved the game, hated the business....
..... The point is that corruption is at the heart of football and in the sudden, unexpected outbreak of bung-awareness, it is time to begin the war, in the knowledge that it will be never-ending. ....Football needs a genuine investigation; it needs genuine enforcement; it needs, above all, a willingness to admit that corruption exists, that it is widespread and that it is destroying the thing it feeds on. Something is rotten in the state of football. Let that be the starting point.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,8303-2005599,00.html



Observer's Crystal Palace's Chairman Simon Jordan
Agents an easy target - a bigger problem is the enemy within
http://football.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,4284,1692117,00.html