Ken Jones: More worldly star turns give impetus to the money-go-round

One evening in 1956, or was it 1957, no matter, a group of prominent Sunderland footballers sat around in satisfied harmony. The prevailing topic of conversation was the illegal inducement they had accepted to sign on at Roker Park. This would lead to an investigation by the Football League, and the permanent suspension of Sunderland's chairman, Bill Ditchburn. But I'm moving too quickly.

All but one of the happy band had been given £1,000 in cash, a sizeable sum at the time, representing a year's salary under the old maximum wage. When the odd man out identified himself, he was advised to take immediate action. "Get in there tomorrow and ask for a grand," he was told.

The next day, after training, he made his way to the office of Sunderland's manager, Bill Murray. No more than a few minutes had passed when he returned to the dressing room, a puzzled look on his face. "Did you get it?" he was asked. "Told me to sod off," he replied. "And, tell me, what is a grand?"

I'm telling you this in the sure and certain belief that nobody today sets out on a career in sport from that level of innocence. Throwing in a cautionary note about expanding areas of corruption may be asking for trouble. But it has become pretty evident that young footballers are influenced to the point where their impulse to take up the game soon becomes the impulse to make a fortune.

It would be absurd not to applaud the fact that sport can now be a worthwhile career, and a hugely profitable one, and that the best games players should be considered like any other star entertainer and be paid accordingly.

However, the present furore over vested interests in football opens up avenues of thought along which a number of Premiership clubs are not eager to travel. Central to this is the investment of some managers in agent groups, a quite ridiculous arrangement that inevitably leaves them vulnerable to speculation.

I imagine that we all have secret ways of compensating for awkward truths, a necessary safeguard since barely a day seems to pass without some wincing fact to make us despair for the future of sport in this money-grabbing age.

Recently, I was given an example of what now goes on in football, one that the teller, an old hand at the game, found disgraceful. It concerned the interest shown by a Premiership club in a player of promise, who had set his heart on joining them. Thrilled by the prospect, he and his parents were then told that all depended on their willingness to sign with a selected agent.

This sort of revelation bruises the fond impression many pleasantly naïve people retain about football, putting it at a par with the worst aspects of professional boxing or, should I say, professional boxing as it was in the 1930s and the immediate post-war years.

Budd Schulberg's novel and screen play, The Harder They Fall, was based on the exploitation of Primo Carnera, whose contract was cut up into so many pieces that he never knew who was collecting from his labours. That a similar situation now applies to the acquisition of players from South America, that it openly goes on under the eyes of Fifa, whose role it is to govern football worldwide, makes you wonder if anyone in a position of authority really cares. A bit here, a bit there. "A percentage of some deals goes to a guy in Turkey," I was told last week. My informant added: "I know agents who tempt managers with a cut of the deal they are trying to push through."

You could say that, in the past few years, football has enjoyed, or suffered, a crashing breakthrough. I am deeply prejudiced in this matter, and I'd better say that so far as I am concerned getting into a financial groove is of no great credit to the game.

Six figures, I suggest, is some sort of turning point in the career, and too often the character, of the very young. Twenty-year-olds, and younger, with an annual seven-figure earning capacity are encouraged by newspapers and television to see themselves as rock stars entitled to adoration, the pamperings of luxury, and not many questions asked about behaviour. Who's to tell them different? Not many agents, that's for sure.