AT THE HEART OF EVERY con trick lies one important truth: you can’t con an innocent person. The sucker must be hooked by means of his own greed, by the deal that’s just slightly too good to be true, by the glorious heady feeling that he’s getting something for nothing.

And that is the core truth of the News of the World’s entrapment of Sven-Göran Eriksson. You can make whatever judgment you like of the newspaper’s tactics; the fact is, they wouldn’t have worked if Eriksson was not (a) greedy and (b) stupid. Without those two inextricably linked character flaws, the famous fake sheikh of tabloid journalism would have had nowhere to put the lever.

Let us not talk about loyalty here. Not, I mean, loyalty as a moral concept. This is not a moral issue at all. There is no question of betrayal, of treachery. What Eriksson is guilty of is very poor contractual manners. If you hire a $1,000 whore for a night out, you don’t expect her to love you. But you are entitled to expect that she doesn’t spend the evening making eyes at the man on the next table.

Eriksson is a mercenary and is paid extraordinarily well for his work. What his employers — and that is ultimately us because we are the audience — are entitled to expect is value for money.

And with take-home pay of £3 million a year, we are entitled to our charming companion’s undivided attention — especially during the most crucial time of the period of employment.

Eriksson’s behaviour is probably not a sackable offence. Certainly, it should do damage to his long-term employment prospects because he has shown us unambiguously that fiscal loyalty is not a concept by which he operates. All the same, Eriksson has certainly damaged England’s cause by being so comprehensively duped.

The dropping of names, contrary to popular belief, is normally something you do to please people, rather than to impress them. And so Eriksson cheerfully dropped a few names and as he did so, he treated these names with exactly the kind of studied, scrupulous indiscretion you use as a form of ingratiation.

Glenn Hoddle’s period as England manager was terminally compromised by his indiscretions about the England players in his book of the 1998 World Cup. Eriksson made potentially damaging comments about David Beckham, Michael Owen, Rio Ferdinand and Wayne Rooney. This is far more serious than his talk about contact-breaking and a five million quid salary. (Net.) That is because when greed comes in at the door, trust jumps out of the window forgetting its trousers.

And Eriksson has forfeited some of the trust of four of the most important members of his team. This cannot help but affect the dynamics of the team. Eriksson has potentially weakened the side we are paying him to strengthen. That is not the sort of behaviour we pay three million quid a year for. Net.

No, for that kind of money, and in the last few months before the biggest football competition of them all, we are entitled to expect Eriksson’s unbroken concentration on the job lying before him. His intention wasn’t to destabilise the team, but it was his greed that did the destabilising.

Greed for money, or greed for prestige and power? Eriksson appeared to want his five million net in order to be upsides with José Mourinho, not because he needs a new fridge. But the truth is that a football manager gets to be No 1 in the dominance hierarchy by winning the greatest prizes, not by banking the most money.

If Eriksson had been 100 per cent conscientious about his job as England head coach, he wouldn’t have flirted with the fake sheikh, he wouldn’t have gone to Dubai. He would have been too busy. He should have had no mental space for these other matters. Not now. Call me after the World Cup. I’ve got a job to do.

And he would not have gone about ingratiating himself by means of namedropping and the telling of tales out of school. When Eriksson was asked questions about Ulrika Jonsson, he said: “This is . . . private . . . and it must remain . . . private.”