They were told how their text messages could be accessed, their betting accounts disclosed and their phone numbers sold on by unscrupulous employees. It should have been entitled “How to spot a fake sheikh from a mile off”.

It is a sad day when a football club need to squeeze that sort of training between shooting drills and set-pieces, but can you blame them? To cite only a few recent examples involving Manchester United: the dressing-room has been bugged, a player tricked into texting a reporter in the belief that he was a team-mate and another star questioned about a rape even though the woman involved went to the newspapers before the police.

Serious sexual allegations have been made against many players without foundation.

Throw in countless kiss-and-tell stories and you begin to see why clubs are advising their young millionaires on celebrity elephant traps. The “fake sheikh” episode will have only fuelled the paranoia of players who do not need another reason to regard the newspapers as the enemy driving all these grubby plots.

None of this is to excuse Sven-Göran Eriksson for his greed and gullibility or to paint footballers as the poor victims of a big, bad world. Behaving themselves is a pretty good way to avoid front-page exposure. While they might not ask for all the attention, the scrutiny does come with its lucrative compensation.

Nor is it only the newspapers and the journalists that have changed. The players have too. The phenomenon of the brattish Premiership footballer is far from rare. It is what happens when you take a 16-year-old out of school and give him a coterie of full-time fawners, a fat wallet and a Bentley.

The players who take money for writing columns in the same newspapers that turn them over are guilty of hypocrisy. But then so are the readers — and you know who you are — who attack the News of the World for tricking the England head coach and then rush out to buy the follow-up.

It has brought about a situation where sports journalists can still form close relationships with players and managers, but the exchange of knowledge is more carefully filtered than ever. Bryan Robson, the West Bromwich Albion manager, bemoaned the changing times when he received a special tribute from the Football Writers’ Association on Sunday night. He pined for the days when he could let his hair down without worrying where the video recorder was hidden.

That shift led Tom Humphries, of The Irish Times, to write pessimistically of the profession in his book Laptop Dancing and the Nanny Goat Mambo. “We are further and further from the action and we are shouting louder and louder just to make ourselves heard. It’s not very dignified, but then if you’ve seen us as a mob, hustling a 19-year-old millionaire for original quotes concerning the choreography of a two-yard, tap-in goal, you know that dignity is low on the list of priorities.”

He could also have mentioned that newspapers still lead the way in breaking stories, exposing wrongdoers and refusing to swallow the party line, but just as television has transformed the wealth and fame of the modern footballer, it has driven a wedge between players and sports writers. A distance that grew just a fraction once the News of the World dropped on Sunday.

After a week when Mike Newell had longed for someone to back up his allegations of corruption, it is a shame that all the many resources required to trick Eriksson could not unearth a crooked agent rather than simply confirming what we knew about the England head coach.

ROBBEN DISMISSAL A BLIGHT BEFORE THE MOURNING AFTER

ARJEN ROBBEN’S sending-off against Sunderland was the most ludicrous case yet of a referee adhering to the letter of the law, but even more remarkable was José Mourinho’s willingness to accept the decision. Has the Chelsea manager made a new year’s resolution to avoid controversy? Even if he has, which is unlikely, it will never survive the two Champions League games against Barcelona.

Who can stand the heat?

SVEN-GÖRAN ERIKSSON’S vices have become tiresome, but spare us the idea that his successor needs to be a paragon of virtue. The FA should be looking for the best coach, not who would be most welcome in a monastery.

Perhaps Martin O’Neill, Stuart Pearce, Guus Hiddink, Steve McClaren and Sam Allardyce do not have a human weakness between them, but you suspect that the reality is different.

Let us hope that, when the spotlight falls on one of them, they can take the heat. The Swede, at least, is a master of that part of the job.

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