Allardyce’s sacking was not just

The other day Sam Allardyce was photographed with Sir Alex Ferguson at a Manchester United Champions League match at Old Trafford. It was clearly the first step in some sort of Allardyce rehabilitation programme. Now, I was never a great fan of his appointment as England manager: anyone who calls themselves ‘Big’ should probably not be allowed anywhere near a once-great English institution. What we have now — Gareth Southgate on a trial, or, one day I hope, Eddie Howe of Bournemouth — is preferable. Nonetheless, the manner of Allardyce’s execution by the FA is troubling.

Entrapment has a long and honourable tradition in investigative journalism — in exposing wrongdoers and villains, sex offenders, criminals, arms dealers. I have done it myself (catching a corrupt immigration official who was trading visas for sex with vulnerable asylum seekers). But there is a nasty downside too, and that comes when investigators use entrapment to create a largely phoney offence and then expose it. After a while this seems to have become the default setting for the News of the World’s one-time star reporter, Mazher Mahmood.

The sting which trapped Allardyce was run by the investigations team from a posher newspaper. In the course of a couple of dinners at a Manchester Chinese restaurant, fuelled by what looks like pints of Chardonnay, he asked for 400 grand to do some speaking in the Far East. He also told journalists, who claimed they were from a major far-eastern sports agency, that it wasn’t that hard to get round the rules on third-party ownership of players. His speaking demand was, I think, largely to put them off, and it was constantly made clear by Allardyce that he would have to run it by the FA.