It cost him the England job, but Sam Allardyce wasn’t the first person to fall foul of the football media. Long before him, the game’s top brass were fielding bizarre requests for tracksuits from Steve Staunton...
Words Jon Spurling
FOOTBALL VS MEDIA
FAKE SHEIKH (PART ONE)
Before his 2016 conviction for conspiring to pervert the course of justice, News of the World journalist Mazher Mahmood excelled at posing as the ‘Fake Sheikh’, tricking a host of celebrities into making some outlandish comments. One of his most notorious stings came in 1998, when he met Newcastle United chiefs Freddy Shepherd and Douglas Hall. Impersonating a wealthy businessman, Mahmood eased Shepherd down the path to self-destruction. “Newcastle girls are dogs,” ranted the increasingly inebriated chief. He then laid into their star striker Alan Shearer: “He’s boring – we call him Mary Poppins.”
Nor were the fans spared, with Shepherd labelling them “mugs” for spending £50 on team shirts which “cost only £5 to make in Asia”. As for Kevin Keegan – or ‘Shirley Temple’ as Shepherd nicknamed him and who’d resigned at St James’ Park the year before – he claimed he was sacked, as “we gave him £60m and he won nothing”. Kev forgave the disgraced duo, saying they were the “biggest Newcastle fans I ever met”, but 10 days after the first NOTW instalment, the chastened duo quit and headed out of Toon, although both returned months later.
THE ‘INCORRUPTIBLES’
How to overcome the knotty problem of copious amounts of cash going missing at the turnstiles in the Republic of Congo’s Brazzaville league? According to league suit Badji Mombu, it was to hire only deaf and dumb teenagers as turnstile operators. Confused? Here’s his reasoning. “We believe that these youths can rightly be called the incorruptibles,” explained the under-fire official in 2003, adding, “it’s fundamentally impossible for them to seek extra personal income from selling discounted tickets.”
At first the plan worked, with leading clubs reporting a 50 per cent rise in profits at the turnstiles, and touts seeing their business virtually disappear. But gate receipts again tumbled, despite attendances remaining healthy. What’s more, the touts returned.
Undercover journalists set out to discover what was happening, and found some of the ‘incorruptibles’ had their heads turned. Inventive ticket touts had mastered sign language, telling the new turnstile operators they would be handsomely rewarded if they offloaded their tickets to them at discounted rates. After being presented with irrefutab
