Sam Allardyce was always destined to fail

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Corruption in football, the sportswriter Arthur Hopcraft once said, horrifies the British more than it does any other nation.

“I don’t think it’s unfair,” Hopcraft remarked, “to suggest that, in some other countries, there’s more of a culture which says that you deserve a reward ‘on the side’ after working hard to rise through the ranks. It’s basically a philosophy of, ‘It’s My Turn Now’. ” When a scandal emerges he added, “there’s a feeling of shared revulsion among all football people, wherever they come from. But in Britain I think we feel it particularly strongly.”

The range and detail of Sam Allardyce’s fatal observations was so complete that, had he been the victim of a vengeful hypnotist who had brainwashed him to recite dialogue calculated to end his career, his ruin couldn’t been more effectively accomplished. As though eager to make the most suicidal use of his limited time on the Telegraph’s concealed recording devices, he ridiculed his predecessor and his assistant, his employers, his stadium, the Royal Family and, by implication, his own players. Had the conversation with undercover reporters in that Mayfair hotel been written as fiction, then the way that Allardyce mispronounced the name of Marcus Rashford – a young man who might just possibly prove to be the most exciting striker of his generation – was a detail that any sane scriptwriter would have discarded as beyond credulity.

Of all his perceived sins, though, none damaged him quite so badly as covetousness. What better time, just after signing an annual contract worth £3 million, could there be to “fill your boots” with a slice of £400,000 that might be procured by acting as consultant to a group of total strangers?

Without seeking to confirm the stereotypes that Hopcraft tried so hard to avoid, I can imagine colleagues in Rome, Paris and Madrid looking at the news this morning and muttering, “Only in England.” Some Italians would consider Allardyce’s behaviour to be a classic example of furbizia, which roughly translates as guilefully manipulating an imperfect world to your own advantage.

“You just can’t imagine this happening anywhere else,” says football writer Tim Rich, “apart from possibly the United States. Television audiences in mainland Europe,” adds Rich, who collaborated on The Manager, an outstanding new memoir by Allardyce’s fellow-pariah Ron Atkinson, “simply wouldn’t comprehend why a publication was seeking to entrap the national football manager.”

Read more: Can we ever forgive Paolo Di Canio?

With hindsight, one of the most surprising aspects of Allardyce’s 67-day reign is that there was not more anxiety expressed, before he was appointed, concerning his know enthusiasm for exploring alternative income streams. He was one of the principal subjects in the 2006 programme, Undercover: Football’s Dirty Secrets,” a Panorama investigation into alleged irregularities in transfer dealings. No action, criminal or otherwise, was taken against the man from Dudley, and Allardyce has always denied any wrongdoing. And yet, as one leading football writer told me, “Allardyce never quite threw off the shadow of that documentary. Did we, as sports journalists, see him as potentially dodgy? Yes. Were we prepared to ignore that because he was good copy and more intelligent than people imagine him to be? Of course we were.”

There was an interesting exchange yesterday on BBC 5 Live between Adrian Chiles and Ian Herbert, chief sportswriter of The Independent. Earlier this year, Herbert said, he had vigorously argued that the former Bolton and West Ham manager should be appointed to the England job.

“The grubbiness and the avarice are just sickening,” Herbert remarked, addressing the Telegraph story. “Sickening. You look at some of the club managers that grace our Premier League now: people like Jürgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola. They happen to be Continentals. The gulf between them and the grubbiness and barefaced greed [exhibited by Allardyce] is astonishing”.

The notion that senior English managers may have moral lessons to learn from counterparts schooled on mainland Europe is an interesting one. If you could eavesdrop on the reaction of two men to the news of Allardyce’s demise, you might do worse than choose Sepp Blatter and Michel Platini, neither of whom nurture great affection for the British press, after the tireless efforts of veteran Scottish reporter Andrew Jennings, and others, to expose the vaudeville at Fifa. “Dear God,” you can imagine Blatter remarking, “They’ll even turn on their own.”

While Fifa, in terms of financial probity, remain in a league, if not a galaxy, of their own, the failings of the English Football Association have historically tended to involve bewilderment, uselessness and indecision. It’s hard not to suspect that it was the FA’s determination to distance themselves once more, swiftly and firmly, from the institutionalised sleaze of the world’s governing body that made Allardyce’s position untenable. This most English of managers, paradoxically enough, fell victim to what some of his fellow-countrymen have long viewed as a foreign disease.

How will he be remembered? The inaugural spell of any new England manager has long had its own peculiar fascination. Their initial confidence in the face of inevitable doom is reminiscent of those archive films in which the pioneers of aviation climb into grotesquely flawed contraptions: each man confident that he’ll be the first to catch a favourable wind, and fly, even though he knows, as we do, that he is destined to enjoy a brief period of hope before being ferried from the wreckage to intensive care. Allardyce is the first to have detonated his aircraft before it was even out of the hangar.

What lesson can his successors take from this episode? The French have a phrase for it: that day back in August, talking to his new friends from the Telegraph, Sam Allardyce missed a very good opportunity, as the Gallic saying goes, to shut up.