Big Sam lands on his feet

As I expected, as soon as a Premier League club got worried they might get relegated, they would call for Big Sam. After all his record in never having been relegated from the Premier League, given the basket case clubs he has managed, is remarkable. And it always seemed to me that, while he had to go from the England job, he'd been daft rather than beyond the pale dodgy.

He told the Daily Telegraph reporters posing as investors, in the context of third party ownership of players (which is banned by the FA) "You can still get round it. You get a percentage of the player's agent's fee that the agent pays to you, the company. You're not getting a part of the transfer fee any more, because you can't do that. But because of the size of the contracts now, the contract will be worth £30m, £40m and you've done a deal with the agent where you're getting 5% of the agent's fee, which is massive for about 2 hours work." This is basically the same as the Premier League's guidance. You can't have third-party ownership clauses and you can't have influence and you can't claim the transfer fee but you can be compensated, although the player will no longer be your property.

No wonder the FA, while thinking they couldn't defend Allardyce, didn't take any further sanctions against him. After all, as Martin Samuel Of the Daily Mail wrote at the time "If he was a lawyer, he would charge £1000 an hour".

Big Sam is no mug and it would be a shock if Crystal Palace don't improve.