THE morning after Panorama had uncovered “Football’s Dirty Secrets” I found myself in conversation with Raymond Sparkes. Now, as far as I’m aware, he doesn’t have cloven feet or a tail. But he is a football agent, a breed regarded with the same general disdain as journalists, estate agents and politicians.

You see you cannot trust them. Last week’s programme proved that. One minute they are alleging they know managers who will take a bung, the next they are claiming they lied because they either saw pound signs flashing in front of their eyes or they were actually – get this – trying to uncover the truth!

As an army of lawyers pick over the details, and the football authorities begin their own investigations, the inescapable feeling was of a game in the gutter. And that is not my word, it is volunteered by Sparkes, a man who can always be relied on to stick his head above the parapet at moments like this.

“It is a tricky one because you don’t want to join in and drag the game any further into the gutter than it already is, but you want to participate in the debate because it’s important. And not to participate might suggest you have something to hide and I certainly have nothing to hide,” he said.

“Sadly in small areas – and it’s not as widespread as television would have you believe – the game is in the gutter. And when you’re in the gutter you find rats. But the only way these rats can survive is if they have people to feed them because if there was no-one to feed them they would soon disappear.”

As the longest-serving licensed agent in the country, it’s no surprise that he has lost count of the number of times that agents have been painted as the villains of the piece. Bizarrely, as he watched last week’s investigation, he at least felt the blame was being spread around more proportionately.

Because regardless of whether managers like Bolton’s Sam Allardyce are damned or exonerated by the official inquiries to come, Panorama gave us an unsavoury glimpse into a world occupied not just by agents, but by scouts, managers, youth academy directors and club chief executives.

Football fans who already believe their game is losing its soul under an avalanche of avarice should have been advised to “look away now” by the programme makers. For if power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, one can only wonder how six-figure weekly salaries and billion- pound television deals affect moral standards and behaviour.

As we chatted, Sparkes told me about his own “black list”. On it are people who work at clubs who he simply will not deal with because to do so would either be a waste of time or it could lead to trouble. (Out of interest, I asked if anyone connected with a Scottish club was on it, he said “no”.)

Put a call into one of these individ uals about a player he represents and Sparkes might find another agent on the phone half-an-hour later, tipped off by his “buddy” at the club.

Of course, I’d have loved to have seen a copy of the list to see if any of the names matched those I’ve heard gossip about. It was the same as I watched Panorama last week. Who were the names bleeped or blanked out for legal reasons? Who was the manager who had seemed poised to accept an illegal payment on camera only to get cold feet at the last minute?

And there was the programme’s major problem. It didn’t have the one thing that would have made it live up to the BBC’s endless hype. It didn’t have “the money shot”, the incontrovertible evidence which showed a bung offered and accepted.

Instead – at least on the question of illegal payments – we had accusations; boasts about influence where bank statements would have been more damning. Was that a surprise? Of course not. If it was easy to prove corruption in British football, George Graham wouldn’t be the only major figure in recent times to have stood in the dock.

What was frustrating about that was it provided so many key players in football with an opportunity to rubbish the programme. The English league managers’ association issued a statement saying Panorama “lacked substance”. And then a roll call of managers talked about it being all smoke and mirrors, almost as if bungs were a figment of someone’s imagin ation.

Tell that to Jimmy Calderwood, Aberdeen’s manager. Or Karl Oyston, the chairman of Blackpool. Last week both went on record to say they had been offered and turned down illegal payments in the past.

If bungs are being offered to those who work at clubs with budgets the size of those at Aberdeen and League One Blackpool, are we really to believe they don’t happen more frequently where the stakes and rewards are higher?

As a viewer I was disappointed in “Football’s Dirty Secret” because it didn’t deliver the knock-out blow I was expecting, when the secret filming actually caught somebody I’d heard of receiving cash rather than a lot of people I’d never heard of merely talking about it.

But I was pleased it was made and shown for one main reason. As Sparkes and I agreed, if you are one of those who has dipped your hand in the till, it was the sort of programme which would surely make you wary about doing it again.

For with Lord Steven’s Quest inquiry into transfer dealings due to report back to the Premier League next month, it is clear the spotlight is shining on this area as never before. And transparency is surely the key thing.

The lower leagues in England have led the way, by trialing a scheme to make their clubs publish details of what they pay agents and why. On its own, it doesn’t stop corruption, but it is a move in the right direction. Because, to return to Sparkes’ analogy, there is only one way to go when you are lying in the gutter.