Fan talk: Bungs in Football
- Posted on January 3, 2007 10:21 AM
- 2 comments
By Matt Killeen
No-one really cares about Bungs. The problem is the word. Bung. He's my mate so I bunged him a couple of quid. It's a word created to describe an everyday occurrence with only the slightest whiff of impropriety. An object thrown casually across a room.
As it turned out Lord Stevens failed to uncover any evidence of Bungs in action, probably because he wasn't allowed to look anywhere he might have found something. The world of football has demonstrated again a reluctance to regulate itself or wrestle with the demons within. In short they don't really give a monkeys.
A large proportion of football consumers don't care either, but for different reasons. To the majority of fans outside the top tier, this is just gossip, the latest edition of an unending z-list celebrity reality show. Who put a mobile phone up their bottom? Which spotty teenage millionaire is buying a house in Surrey or Cheshire? Who got 100k to sign a Latvian defender?
When one of your problems is whether some shyster is about to sell your ground to build a supermarket, the activities of Big Sam and Son seem inconsequential. A previous owner legally evicting your club or the administrators shaking buckets outside the home end is far more relevant, not to mention having more resonance for most fans. These things just don't make back page headlines, probably because there is no member of Girls Aloud involved. The idea that someone is getting a backhander to smooth through a transfer that was probably going to happen anyway doesn't really seem to be worth worrying about.
Getting upset about bungs has not served the game well in the past. Arsenal wandered in a trophyless wilderness for years after making an example of George Graham. England lost Terry Venables to the same kind of sanctimony that denied the nation the greatest England manager of all time, everyone's favourite king of the bung, Brian Clough.
Far more disturbing are those parts of the game that remain perfectly legal. When an agent gets paid by both sides in a transfer that he has engineered, money is sucked out of the game that will never be seen again. Similar quantities of cash are slicing into
the bank accounts of players at the top of the game on a weekly basis, enough for any one Chelsea player to fund a League 2 side for months at a time.
In Liaison Dangereuses, Valmont muses how cheaply he rescued a whole family from penury and what good value it represented. One wonders whether someone like Ashley Cole will ever find the redemption that awaited the similarly calculating anti-hero or whether it will be the game itself that will lie bleeding in the snow on some morning to come.
Comments (2)
Waterboy
One of the saddest parts for me about that whole Panorama investigation is that we no longer get Harry and Big Sam interviewed on Match Of The Day, because, understandably, they won't talk to the beeb! Big characters both. Joe Jordan is no substitute.
Posted on January 4, 2007 12:31 PM
James
agreed... and whos that guy from Bolton.... Ricky skribbla???? - agreed! a real loss!!
Posted on January 4, 2007 6:20 PM
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