Genesis of Sam Allardyce’s trouble with English FA

Sam Allardyce lost his England  job after he was filmed in an undercover investigation giving advice on how to bend the country’s FA rules on transfer of players.

The man fondly called Big Sam was filmed using his new position as England manager to negotiate a £400,000 deal with fake businessmen and offer them advice about how to get around Football Association transfer rules on transfers relating to the complicated third party ownership of foreign players.

The businessmen were in fact from a fictitious Far East firm cast in a sting by Daily Telegraph.

The coach, said to be the best paid national coach in the world, also said several unpleasant things for which he was invited to face questioning by his employers, the English FA today.

In the film, Allardyce mocks his predecessor, Roy Hodgson’s speech — calling him ‘Woy’.

He also says Hodgson would ‘send people to sleep,’ as an after dinner speaker, adding that ‘he hasn’t got the personality for it’.

He says that Hodgson ‘just collapsed’ as England manager and that the players had ‘let him down’. Allardyce blames former England No 2 Neville for the failure to send on Marcus Rashford earlier as England crashed out to Iceland at Euro 2016 and accused him of being ‘the wrong mix’.

Allardyce claims the FA had ‘stupidly’ rebuilt Wembley for £870million.

He also says of his employers: ‘They’re all about making money aren’t they? You know the FA’s the richest football association in the world? Well, I shouldn’t say that. They’re not the richest at all. What they do is they have the biggest turnover in the world with £325m.’

Allardyce, former coach of Sunderland, West Ham and Bolton Wanderers earns £3m-a-year plus bonuses according to the terms of his two-year contract, with a further two-year option.

With a salary of three million pounds, he was  the world’s highest-paid international manager.