February 20 – George is all Bunged Up
TODAY folks we are talking dodgy exchanges between people in motorway services car parks. No, it’s not Stan the man Collymore again, but that scourge of modern football that has been so hard to pin down: bungs.
We have already told you about the BBC’s half-arsed attempts to uncover a widespread culture of corruption – the only tangible result of which is that we have to make do with Joe Jordan’s post match thoughts on Match of the Day as ‘Arry won’t talk to the Beeb anymore. Obviously Big Sam Allardyce was operating a similar policy until Mike Ashley forced him to adopt a ‘not-having-a-job-anymore’ policy in January.
It was in this day in 1995 that the first bung scandal to hit English football kicked off when it emerged a Premier League enquiry had found Arsenal manager George Graham guilty of accepting a bung from Rune Hauge, a Norwegian agent.
The enquiry said Graham had received £425,000 in illegal payments in the transfers of Pal Lydersen and John Jensen to Arsenal.
Despite having led the club to a hat full of trophies including two league titles and the European Cup Winners’ Cup the Gunners board did not hesitate to sack Graham the day after the enquiry released its findings.
The board even discussed prosecuting their erstwhile manager but decided against it, instead leaving his punishment to the FA. Five months later they found him guilty of misconduct and gave him a world-wide year-long ban on working in football.
Despite being the only man to have been found guilty of taking illegal bungs in the history of the game, Graham did not find work hard to come by when his ban ended on June 30 1996 and Leeds snapped him up as their new boss after sacking the impossibly dull Howard Wilkinson.
At Elland road he proved he may have lost his integrity but not his managerial ability as he steered the club away from relegation danger and finished a very respectable fifth in his second season in charge.
Then he shocked the football world when he walked out on Leeds to take the reigns at Arsenal’s arch rivals Tottenham Hotspur in October 1998. Despite winning the League Cup just five months after he arrived at White Hart Lane the Spurs fans never took to him because of his Arsenal connections, and the Arsenal fans could not forgive him for taking the Spurs job in the first place, meaning he was now hated by both North London teams.
After a while Spurs chairman Daniel Levy wasn’t that keen on him either and after three years of failing to get the team a top-ten Premiership finish he was given the boot in 2001.
Despite being linked with a host of high profile jobs since then he has instead spent his Sunday afternoons offering expert analysis for Sky Sports and looking bored out of his face while doing it.
Graham remains the only man to have ever been found guilty of taking a bung despite rumours and investigations aplenty about many other well known names in the game. As entirely uncontroversial media-shy recluse Mike Newell said in 2006: “If George Graham is the only one guilty of taking a bung in the last 10 years, I would be absolutely amazed.”
And we had better leave it there or ‘Arry Redknapp and Big Sam will stop talking to us, but swing by this way tomorrow for more footballing blasts from the past.
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March 16 - George’s White Hart Pain | On This Football Day on March 16th, 2008
[...] Gunners reign was not brought to an end by on-field matters and it only ended when he was sacked after it was revealed he had taken a bung – the feeling remained that although his official ties with the Highbury club had been severed, his [...]