KEY POINTS:
It was to be the weekend when the sports world's equivalent of the Roman Empire, the one dressed in football kit and designer suits rather than togas and laurel leaves, was supposed to strut its way into an orgy of self-aggrandisement.
Four Premiership players - Gary Neville and
Michael Carrick of Manchester United, the Chelsea and England captain John Terry and Liverpool's Steven Gerrard - were heading for extravagant marriages befitting top-paid employees of a domestic industry with a disposable income of £900 million ($2.36 billion) a year.
Rupert Murdoch was making the speech in which he announced himself the saviour of the English national game, the television godfather who for so long has been guaranteeing the years of plenty.
Pity, though, about Lord Stevens, the old cop from Scotland Yard who just would not go away.
Six months ago, leading Premiership clubs were crying for the end of his "bung inquiry". They said he should put up or shut up.
This weekend he put up. It might not have been the devastating conclusion that some feared, but more than ever before the football public were left in no doubt that there was much to question in the administration of the game they support so enthusiastically and, hitherto, so trustingly.
Lord Stevens announced that 17 transfer deals just could not be signed away. He named names.
He pointed out the "conflict of interest" presented by the relationship between Sam Allardyce when he was manager of Bolton Wanderers and his son, Craig, a football agent. Four Bolton deals were listed in the 17 problem transfers.
Newcastle, Allardyce's new club, also have four transfers to explain. While there has been no charge from Lord Stevens that there has been any wrongdoing at Newcastle, or elsewhere, the North-east club's former manager Graeme Souness was named for the "inconsistency" of some of his evidence.
Kenneth Shepherd, son of the club chairman Freddy, was also cited for his "unspecified" role in Newcastle's transfer dealing.
Chelsea, Middlesbrough and Portsmouth also pushed through transfers that cannot be approved at this point. Eight agents, including the heavyweight Pini Zahavi, confidant of the Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich and friend of Sven Goran Eriksson, the man who unwittingly helped to provoke the inquiry when he claimed to undercover reporters that three Premiership managers accepted bungs, have been accused of failing to cooperate with the inquiry.
Now the Football Association, its compliance unit beefed up by Stevens' Quest team, and world governing body, Fifa, have been invited to carry on the probe, and possible disciplinary action. One case is believed already to be under police investigation.
All in all, it added up to an indictment suggesting maladministration, at the very least, that means big-time football would be wise to take the flowers from its hair and the magnums of champagne from its lips on this weekend of planned celebration of the days of milk and honey.
The old cop made clear that the least of his hopes was that, in future, football business would be conducted along transparent lines.
That was, he implied, the best gift he could give to a game whose practices have long dismayed the organisers of other professional sports leagues, notably in North America.
The US pattern has long been advocated by leading agent Jon Holmes, a man who handled the careers of Gary Lineker and Michael Atherton.
In the wake of Lord Stevens' announcement, Holmes said: "The good news is that this bung inquiry has not gone away. The future direction of a game above suspicion has been pointed out."
Sports Minister Richard Caborn was quick to home in on the problem of agents, and welcomed the naming of those who did not co-operate with the inquiry, but of course agents have to do business with people operating within the game. They do not live in some area of opportunity inhabited only by themselves.
The overwhelming reaction to the Stevens report has to be a complete reappraisal of the role of agents.
With so much money sloshing around the game, in so many apparently unchartable areas, the insistent call must now be for agents to be involved only in negotiations on behalf of their single client in any proposed deal and to receive payment directly from that client when the transfer has been officially cleared.
Any other function is plainly counter-productive to the ideal of transparent dealing that carries no obvious trap of conflict of interest.
Premiership clubs, with their vast funding, are now under pressure to conduct their own transfer negotiations, to have their own staff or directors - and no one else - initiating moves for new players.
Anything less specific and the doubts inevitably engendered by the Stevens findings can only accelerate; the more money at the Premiership's disposal, the greater the suspicion that the 17 unsatisfactory transfer deals represent, at least potentially, the tip of a vast iceberg. This is the climate that football is now obliged, for the sake of long-term credibility, to blow away.
It is one that is clouded with doubt and a growing measure of revulsion. When Ashley Cole, the former Arsenal defender now at Chelsea, wrote his autobiography last year he raged that, when the Highbury club offered him a mere £55,000 a week in a new contract, he almost drove his car off the road.
That was a signal that football was losing its grip on the reality of its relationship with the public, a fact not notably softened at the time by the player's own wedding extravaganza.
Stevens' revelations were not directly related to such wild assumptions about the value in which individual footballers now hold themselves. But they did underline a problem that some believe is reaching close to bursting point. It is of a game which has waxed so fat it has lost any coherent view of itself; a game that believes it has indeed inherited a world that is full of the good things in life, among which the need for accountability has for some time not been included.
Football may order the music to play on. But perhaps it should listen more carefully to the words of the song.
- INDEPENDENT
