England manager Sam Allardyce has been urgently summoned to Wembley to be sacked, after only 67 days and one game in charge.
In a sting operation revealed by the Telegraph yesterday, the 61-year-old Englishman appeared to be instructing some undercover reporters on how to evade the third-party ownership laws set by the FA and negotiate a massive deal worth £400,000 to instruct a Far East firm regarding the matter. This agreement could be labelled as a potential ‘conflict of interest’.
The Times report that the former Sunderland and West Ham United manager has been summoned to Wembley, where there was an emergency meeting held this morning with FA chairman Greg Clarke and chief executive Martin Glenn investigating the matter before taking their decision, and it is reported that Allardyce is set to be relieved of his duties as England manager after the duo had taken a decision and were ready to act.
In the conversations recorded during the sting operation by the Telegraph, Allardyce can be seen stating that bypassing those third-party FA laws, which he labelled ‘ridiculous’, wouldn’t be a problem. The FA laid down said laws in 2008, which prevent third party organisations from owning a players economic rights, after they thought that it would compromise the integrity of the game.
Allardyce went on to say that one particular unnamed group were still doing it for years and that one could ”get around it” by suggesting that the Firm hire the players’ agents so as to compensate for the fact that they couldn’t directly profit from it.
He is reported to have said : “You get a percentage of the player’s agent’s fee that the agent pays to you, the company, because he’s done that new deal at the club again or they sell him on, and you’re not getting a part of the transfer fee anymore, because you can’t do that. But, you get – because of the size of the contracts now, the contract will be worth £30, £40 million, at 10 per cent and you’ve done a deal with the agent where you’re getting five per cent of the agent’s fee, which is massive for doing about two hours’ work.”
The only game Sam Allardyce has presided over as England manager was their 1-0 win against Slovakia. The FA will likely want to resolve the issue before England get ready to play Malta and Slovenia in the World Cup qualifiers on the 8th and 11th of October.
