FOOTBALL CONFIDENTIAL: SCAMS, SCANDALS AND SCREW-UPS
by David Conn, Chris Green, Richard McIlroy and Kevin Mousley
BBC, £6.99, pp. 256, ISBN 0563488581
By chance I picked up Tom Bower’s Broken Dreams shortly after putting down a paperback reissue of Selina Hastings’ biography of Nancy Mitford. Curiously there was a solitary point of contact. This was the description applied by Lady Redesdale, Nancy’s mother, to the collection of preening Oxford aesthetes that her daughter invited to the house for weekends: ‘What a set!’ Invited to meet the 20 chairmen of the Premiership, bidden to dine with the Football Association or inspect the assorted riff-raff operating as ‘agents’, Lady Redesdale, you fear, would have expressed her disdain in rather similar terms.
Driven by the need for instant results, and with much of its money coming in the shape of cash receipts, professional football has always incorporated a hulking sleaze factor.
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