James Lawton: Football must avoid these potential conflicts of interest

Anyone fascinated by the impassioned belief of the Premiership chief executive Richard Scudamore that English football is a suitable case for self-regulation should do a little trawling through a few relevant facts.

The result is surreal. Did you know, for example, that the chairman of Newcastle United, Freddy Shepherd, has a son, Kenny, who operates as a football agent from an office at the club?

Or that the esteemed manager Sir Bobby Robson had a BBC business reporter thrown out of a press conference for having the temerity to ask whether it was entirely ethical to have a substantial shareholding in the firm of the leading agent, Paul Stretford, who recently took charge of the career of Everton's prodigy Wayne Rooney?

That last development may have had something to do with the Everton chief executive, Michael Dunsford, recently selling his shares in Stretford's Pro-active agency.

It is well known, of course, that Sir Alex Ferguson's son Jason was working for Mike Morris' Elite agency at the time they handled Jaap Stam's transfer from Old Trafford to Lazio. Less publicised, perhaps, but still disturbing enough for anyone who believes that, seven years after George Graham's 12-month suspension, football should be seen to be as uncompromised as Caesar's wife, is the full list of football agents who just happen to be the sons of managers.

It includes Mark Allardyce, son of the Bolton Wanderers manager Sam, Matthew Francis, son of Crystal Palace's Trevor, Jamie Hart, son of Nottingham Forest's Paul, and Mark Redknapp, son of Portsmouth's Harry.

There is also the case of Darren Dein, son of the Arsenal vice-chairman David Dein, who has worked as a consultant for the leading London agent, Jerome Anderson. Darren also happens to be the son-in-law of the man who took over from Sir Alan Sugar at Tottenham Hotspur, David Buchler.

None of this is meant to imply a whiff of wrongdoing, of course, only that conditions of potential conflict of interest are literally being bred into an English professional game which so loudly proclaims its ability to organise its own affairs without even the passing need for outside supervision.

When the details of the Graham affair were related to an official of America's National Football League, the reaction was one of complete befuddlement. That an agent and a manager should work together in the conduct of a transfer, that the agent should be able to distribute the proceeds of that deal, and that sometimes in English football agents have acted for both the buyer and the seller, beggared the American's belief. "I just can't believe this could happen in a properly regulated professional sport," the NFL official said.

Heaven knows what he would have made of the excellent research of Richard McIlroy, who produced, under the shadow of the World Cup, the investigative programme On the Line for BBC Radio Five Live which started off as a look at the bizarre phenomenon of football managers and their agent sons and spread itself, naturally, into the astonishing fact that a great herd of managers had invested in the flotation of the Stretford agency.

Strangely, or not, McIlroy's investigation caused scarcely a ripple beyond Robson's brusque expulsion of the man who had the nerve to ask whether he should really be investing in a branch of football which according to many had left the game in a state close to penury.

As of last Friday, among Stretford's investors was John Gregory, the former Aston Villa manager currently being investigated by the Football Association compliance unit over the conduct of several high-profile transfers. Also on the list were Martin O'Neill of Celtic (120,000 shares), Kevin Keegan of Manchester City (200,000), Howard Wilkinson of Sunderland (108,000, 60,000 of them listed as in the care of Martin Sherwood of the City accountants Teather and Greenwood), Arthur Cox, a Keegan assistant at Maine Road (40,000), Craig Brown of Preston North End (120,000) and Graeme Souness of Blackburn Rovers (400,000).

Again there is no evidence of mischief, but it is a matter of record that Souness signed Andy Cole, a Stretford client, for Blackburn at a fee of around £8m. If Scudamore is so happy about football's grasp of the principle of self-regulation, might he not properly wonder with some apprehension about not only incestuous football relationships but also this new area of potential conflict of interest?

When approached by the BBC, Sunderland's former manager, Peter Reid, replied that he had done nothing wrong but maybe his investment in Pro-active was not blazingly appropriate. He sold his shares. But it is another matter for the record that he had bought from Rangers Claudio Reyna, the American player who happens to be another Pro-active client. Sam Allardyce also sold his shares in Pro-active soon after being contacted by the BBC.

When appraised of the Secretary of State Tessa Jowell's demand for transparency in football – as opposed to the Downing Street press office – Scudamore said: "The clubs are aware that there is going to be an audit of transfers. It holds no fear and there is nothing unreasonable about it. But what we are not going to have is the FA coming crawling all over our clubs and looking at their finances." Why not? It cannot be because the game has organised itself into a bastion of impeccable business practices.

Indeed, both the Professional Footballers' Association and the Managers' Association have formally proposed that football radically changes its transfer system, suggesting a clearing house along the American lines which denies any role to an agent except that of negotiating on behalf of their clients with the buying club. All payments to agents would come directly from their client, ie the player. The Managers' Association is also addressing the problem of having fathers and sons operating for interests within the game which are diametrically opposed.

There are two other random facts which help to put into some perspective Scudamore's declaration that the distribution of football's finances is not in screaming need of some outside appraisal. One is that the fallen chief executive of the FA, Adam Crozier, had made the radical reform of the transfer system a key element in his effort to prevent the professional game riding to hell. The other is that at a time when Peter Kenyon, the chief executive of Manchester United, asserts that football can support only 40 professional clubs, one of the game's leading agents, Mike Morris, now resides in Monaco. He formerly lived in Bolton, where he sold used tyres.