Dear Twitter Einsteins, it was not entrapment – all greedy Big Sam had to do was say ‘no’

Let’s get this straight: Sam Allardyce was brought down by his own greed. It wasn’t a media conspiracy, he wasn’t hounded out of office, it was not entrapment. The reason he is no longer England manager is because he attempted to sell access to information that would circumnavigate his own employer’s rules. As breaches of contracts go, that is pretty clear cut.

But then perhaps we should not be too surprised. The man who, when he was appointed back in July, gushed a load of PR guff about how this was the biggest job in the game, about its importance and dignity, about how he would do whatever was necessary to bring about success, was, within days of signing on the dotted line, seeking ways to monetise his position. That was what mattered to him: how his current account might benefit.

Following the money, he was introduced by his old friend Scott McGarvey to a couple of reporters posing as Far Eastern businessmen. For those within football, those three words are cat nip. Far Eastern and businessmen means one thing and one thing only: money. And lots of it.

Yet Allardyce had just been appointed England manager. The least he should have done is undertake a brief bit of due diligence about those he was due to meet. There is such a thing as Google. But no, blinded by the possibility of easy cash, bewitched by the idea that some Chinese bounty might be heading his way, he blundered his way through the meeting, bigging up his own prowess, portraying himself as some sort of footballing Tony Blair, full of bluster about telephone-number fees for keynote addresses.

But blather was not the problem. Bigging yourself up is not a sackable offence. The issue was his happy insistence that he was willing to help these supposed businessmen skip round the rules of third party ownership brought in by the FA in an attempt to bring some clarity to the transfer system. For a fee, obviously. As George Bernard Shaw might have put it, this immediately established what kind of man Sam Allardyce is. All that remained to be decided was the scale of the payment. If he was prepared to discuss such a thing with people he had only just met, what else might he be prepared to do if the price was right? That was the window into his motivation. That was his undoing.

Now he may have been unfortunate that the discussion he had was with undercover reporters. He may have been unlucky that McGarvey, a man he had known for thirty years, was unwittingly leading him towards a bear trap. But the very fact he was prepared to speak about such things to complete strangers suggests it is not implausible to believe that plenty of other discussions were taking place with others, discussions to which we were not privy.

And yet, in several quarters it is the messenger who is being blamed. The Times columnist Matthew Syed has led the chorus of disapproval. This was entrapment, he wrote this morning, a classic sting. The FA should have stood by its man. From a journalist who has written coruscating columns about FIFA and IOC corruption came the suggestion that a man prepared to sell information about illegal subterfuge was somehow hard done by.

The Einsteins of Twitter duly followed. I hope you are satisfied, one angry follower wrote to me, undermining the England football team yet again. You just want us to fail. One of my correspondents even suggested that there was nothing wrong with a bit of deceit. After all, Roy Hodgson was an upright man and look where that got us.

For sure, yeah, because that always works doesn’t it? The manager filling his pockets with secretive and illegal loot always helps produce a winning football team. Really that should be the first thing you are taught of the UEFA management course.

The truth is nobody forced Sam Allardyce to put his soul up to the highest bidder. All he needed to do was say no. Simple. And you would have thought being paid £3million a year might have inured him from the need to seek more. But in football more is never enough.

And brace yourself, all those who would rather not know what is going on: Allardyce’s exposure was part of a wider Daily Telegraph investigation into agent corruption, an investigation which is revealing systematic and widespread wrongdoing at the highest levels of the game. An investigation which, before it is published, has been rigorously tested in the law. This is not a fishing expedition, this is not lies or made-up tales or honey-trapping. This is an exposure of wholesale wrongdoing.

As it uncovers the evidence, the investigation also demonstrates something else: how ineffective our game’s investigative procedures are. Here have been the FA, sitting atop the moral high ground lecturing FIFA and UEFA on efficacy and corruption, unaware that under their very noses their own rules were being flouted by their principal employee.

But this is the central problem of English football: those in charge of regulation have neither the power nor the money properly to investigate what is going on. The FA is an entirely reactive organization, they act once the information has been presented to them. As far as they were concerned, without the Telegraph intervention, Allardyce would have still been England manager this morning, still advising on how to bend the rules, still seeking a cash payout for inside information. Had the press not exposed him, he would have been cheerfully touting himself to the highest under-the-counter bidder. Sure, the FA acted quickly and decisively once his duplicity was revealed. But they wouldn’t have known.

It has been ever thus. The bung culture of the early nineties was revealed by a tabloid investigation. The corruption at FIFA was exposed by the tireless work of Andrew Jennings. It was Barney Ronay in the Guardian this week who reported the links between council officials and the enforced re-development plans at Millwall FC. It is the press which does the work the FA simply does not have the means to undertake. And frankly the press, constantly stripped of investigative resources by budget cuts, does not turn its attention anything like often enough.

Alan Shearer suggested this week that the Allardyce issue means English football has reached rock bottom. That is a phrase which implies things could not get any worse. Unfortunately, from what I understand about what is yet to come out, we are nowhere near the end of the downward spiral.

And it is about time our footballing authorities, dazzled by the wealth swishing around their property, started to focus on the lasting damage being done, under their watch, to our game.