CAN ANYONE provide a rational explanation as to why half of the British police force was deployed to arrest Harry Redknapp and one or two other football luminaries, such as Charlton’s exciting midfield maestro Amdy Faye, last week? A total of 60 coppers swooped in a dawn raid; there were multiple paddywagons, dogs and, God knows, quite probably aerial support and snipers. Did they think Harry was going to barricade himself in his house screaming, “You’ll never take me alive, pig”? Did they think Faye posed some sort of a threat? Haven’t they seen him play? Did they think Milan Mandaric was armed and maybe had hostages?

Watching the parade of rozzers (28 altogether, apparently) trot into the home of the football agent Willie McKay, one was immediately reminded of that scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian where hundreds of Roman soldiers search a tiny house and emerge proudly having discovered a spoon.

Was this a meaningful utilisation of police resources, do you suppose, given that someone was probably being stabbed for his mobile phone 300 yards away and that Harry wasn’t even at home at the time? Or was there rather, as Redknapp has speculated, a very deliberate theatrical element to the affair? “I still feel I was only called into this because, being high profile, I add a bit of profile to the investigation,” he said while watching any last vestige of his chances of becoming the manager of England go up in smoke. He has dark misgivings about the timing of the arrests, but this may be simple paranoia. However, his bemusement at the scale of the police operation should be matched by the rest of us. Nobody has been charged, and my guess is that they won’t be. The arrests were occasioned “on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud and false accounting”. A suspicion is all that will remain, one, er, suspects.

There was a certain logic to the comments of that other ubiquitous football agent, Barry Silkman, reported in The Guardian last month. Silkman has declined to cooperate further with an investigation conducted by the FA’s compliance unit into the alleged bunging of players and managers. He pointed out that if all of the players, managers and club chairmen with whom he did business had been cleared by the FA of accepting bungs and exonerated then, de facto, Silkman must be exonerated too. You can’t bang up the bunger if there’s no bungee.

There’s a case for saying Silkman should have been sent down in the 1980s for the hairstyle he adopted while playing out his career with Orient, but that’s a cheap and uncalled for digression. I reckon the truth is that the FA find it altogether more amenable to focus its attention on the agents – who are universally loathed by the wider public – than on the managers. The police, meanwhile, seem to see things the other way around.

So far we have had plenty of very high-profile “arrests”, famous or semi-famous people taken in for questioning and no charges of any kind. Pascal Chimbonda, for example, arrested in September, is presumably still on bail. If the police investigation were a football team, it would be Tottenham Hotspur: an awful lot of style, but not much in the way of substance. There are, you suspect, multiple agendas at work, on behalf of the police – who wish to be seen doing stuff – and the FA – who would like to be seen doing stuff but not if it upsets the wrong people.

If there is corruption in the game then it should be excised. If managers sign players through an agent solely for the bung they will receive, knowing that the player is about as much use to the world as a Shaun Wright-Phillips cross, or a David Beckham tackle, then it would be pleasing if something could be done about it.

But how you prove that sort of business is beyond me, the police and the FA, it would seem. There is no great reward for whistle-blowing honesty, as Mike Newell will be happy to explain to you while he queues for his giro.

In any case, it is less the bungs, per se, that enrage the fans and sap the strength from the game, than the extortionate and wholly legitimate sums demanded by agents for the procuring of players. In other words, it is not so much a criminal matter as an issue of fairness, and one directly for the FA to resolve. Supporters resent their hard-earned money going into the pockets of perma-tanned multinational wideboys, even more than they resent it going into the pockets of their useless perma-tanned centre-forward.

It is galling for fans of lower-league clubs watching the money haemor-rhage out of the game while the 72 teams outside the Premier League cannot afford to run decent scouting systems or youth training academies. A straightforward cap on agent fees would go some distance to sorting that problem out; and absolute transparency in club accounts.

Meanwhile, the Premier League’s managers and chairmen should beware that rapping on the door at six o’clock in the morning and coppers smashing through the window in Kevlar waistcoats, the TV crews filming it all from outside for the early evening news.