WHEN the Titanic went down in 1912, the Bolton Evening News was lost for a local angle. How to make sense of this momentous event for their readers? In the end, it went for the bright side. “No One From Bolton Lost In Titanic Sinking” it read. Not everybody was so lucky. “Norwich Man Drowns” stated a headline across the other side of the country.

Last night’s Panorama programme promised to be the Titanic of corruption investigations, going down like a stone and taking all hands with it. In the end, most made it to the lifeboats, apart from a small party from Greater Manchester. Having got lucky in the mid-Atlantic, Bolton struck an iceberg yesterday.

Football may not have been rocked by Panorama, but the Reebok Stadium was. Doing business through your son was always going to arouse suspicion — ask Sir Alex Ferguson — and last night the chickens, not to mention some aggravating crowing cockerels, came home to roost for Sam and Craig Allardyce.

Unless the father can provide a convincing explanation for the involvement of his son in so much of Bolton Wanderers’ transfer business, he could be the biggest casualty of the BBC’s investigation into corruption in football, a score far higher than many imagined.

The rest was much as expected. Indeed, it could be argued that the BBC would have been better focusing on Allardyce and Bolton rather than diluting a powerful message with gossip and innuendo.

Allardyce is damaged by this, make no mistake of that. Even if the evidence remains circumstantial, claims that three named Bolton transfers contained payments to his son means that FA Premier League investigators will be swarming over the paperwork. Allardyce’s stance in allowing this to happen was at best unprofessional and at worst an abuse of his position.

As for the remainder of football’s fraternity, unless Panorama can provide a comparable paper trail, the evidence hinges on a series of statements from small-fry agents, many of whom are now in denial.

The footage was artfully put together and lit to create a collage of corruption, yet close examination revealed it to be light on specifics. Maybe football really is populated by master criminals who are so adept at covering their tracks that no clues can be found, or maybe it is just a lot easier operating on a nod and a wink basis, rather than tackling those whose corruption might be measured in millions and not fit comfortably into a brown paper bag.

Many allegations were general and unproven. Harry Redknapp was offered Andy Todd, the Blackburn Rovers captain, rather than tapped him up. Frank Arnesen, the Chelsea director of football, entered specific discussions about Nathan Porritt, the Middlesbrough teenager, having been told that it was 99.9 per cent certain that he would leave. What was he meant to do? Wait for confirmation of the other 0.01 per cent?

This is not to dismiss an examination of football’s morality, but while there is no tangible proof of money changing hands, much of what Panorama has uncovered merely amounts to gossip, and the continuance of the tower of babble that has surrounded football since the days when a former chairman of Tottenham Hotspur decided to expose corruption at the moment when it no longer suited him to ignore his suspicions.

In June 1993, Sir Alan Sugar went public on a conversation in which Terry Venables suggested that Brian Clough would require personal payment to seal the transfer of Teddy Sheringham from Nottingham Forest. Strangely, though, the Sheringham deal had gone through on August 27, 1992, meaning that Sugar’s denouncement did not come until ten months later in an affidavit that coincidentally formed part of a bitter legal battle with Venables.

Sugar versus Venables may be ancient history, but their confrontation established the parameters for the bung scandals of the future. Just as the language of industrial relations dictates that the workforce always demands while employers offer, so in bung parlance agents are dodgy, managers are bent and chairmen are doe-eyed innocents whose previous business escapades have been modelled on the teachings of Saint Francis and are rendered powerless by underclass skulduggery.

Mike Newell, the Luton Town manager, initially made two accusations of corruption: one against an agent, the other against a football club chairman, both unnamed. Yet which one was most vigorously pursued? The one who played to our prejudices, of course. Perish the thought that the gentlemen in control of the purse-strings of football clubs could be on the take.

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• Graham Spiers