It was in January last year that Mike Newell, then the manager of Luton Town, claimed that he had been offered bungs to facilitate transfers and alleged that “millions of pounds” had gone out of the game and into the pockets of agents. The ripples spread far and wide, prompting inquiries by the football authorities, undercover TV teams and the police. Yesterday they arrived back in Luton in the form of 55 FA charges against eight agents, four past and present directors and the Coca-Cola League One club itself. It remains to be seen whether Kenilworth Road and all who play in her will be swamped as a result.

The club are charged with making undisclosed payments to agents through a separate company and providing misleading information to the FA. The two directors who are still involved in football face fines for failing to report rule breaches, while the other two, including Bill Tomlins, the former chairman, can expect sanctions to be waiting for them if they attempt to get back into the game.

The agents, though, are likely to claim that it is up to a club to decide how to pay them their legitimately earned fees and inform the authorities. Sky Andrew, one of the agents who has been charged, said that any offence he had committed was at most a “technical breach” and was a “paper-work issue”. “Me, myself and my company adhere to every rule in the game,” he said.

The FA will be keenly aware that Luton, who came out of receivership only in May 2004, are losing £3 million a year and do not own their ground, could be seriously damaged by a heavy fine. It may also count in their favour that key evidence in the investigation was provided from within the club.

Last June, five months after Newell first made his allegations, Cherry Newbery, the club secretary, presented the FA with a dossier that she had compiled on transfers conducted by the club. And it was the Luton board of directors who later forced Tomlins to inform the FA of the illegal payments. As a result, Tomlins is reported to have admitted to FA lawyers in March that he had made 13 unauthorised payments to seven agents. He justified the payments on the ground that Newell had made it impossible for the club to deal with agents because of constant rows over their commissions.

Tomlins paid the agents from a bank account controlled by Jayten Stadium Ltd, a holding company set up in November 2003 to acquire the assets of the football club and finance the development of a new ground outside Luton town centre. All the alleged payments were in addition to legitimate payments that were declared to the FA as part of the official transactions.

The payments from the Jayten account, co-signed by Derek Peter, then the finance director, were not declared to the main board of directors at the club, although Newell is believed to have found out about some of them. It was only when a possible takeover of the club called for a process of due diligence that the irregular payments were discovered by the main board and Tomlins was told to admit what he had done to the FA.

“The rules for dealing with payments to agents were poorly policed, so when it came to it, I telephoned the FA to tell them I had been making irregular payments,” Tomlins said earlier this year. “I know it was a breach of the rules but I thought I had reasonable grounds. I broke the rules, no question, from the time we went into the Championship [in 2005].

“But, I’ll tell you, it was to avoid the rantings, the ragings and the bullying of the manager. Michael became a nightmare with agents. I had to speak to agents directly – if I hadn’t, we wouldn’t get the player. What he will love will be another ‘I told you so’ – that’s how he operates.”

Newell was dismissed by Luton for “gross misconduct” in March this year. After a fifth successive defeat, he questioned why £9 million received in transfer fees had not been reflected in his playing budget, which did not go down well with his employers.

The club’s accounts later revealed that £8.6 million had been generated in transfer fees through selling Curtis Davies, Steve Howard, Kevin Nicholls, Carlos Edwards and Rowan Vine, but that only £2.525 million had not been swallowed by debt and payments of £1.85 million to players, agents and management.

“This vindicates the stance which I took last year,” Newell said yesterday. “It ultimately cost me my job, but people will now understand why I went public and spoke to the Football Association. I considered it my duty as the manager of a football club to make the authorities aware of what was going on. At present I can say no more as my own case is ongoing.”

Since Newell first went public with his allegations, the authorities have tried to clear up what is generally perceived as a “bung culture” within the game. However, the Stevens enquiry achieved an unspectacular outcome, and when BBC’s undercover Panorama team attempted to turn up hard evidence against allegedly corrupt agents and managers, it failed to lay a glove on anyone.

So the suspicion will be that some of yesterday’s charges, over payments totalling £160,000 – a figure that seems trifling compared with the money changing hands in the Premier League – represent a scattergun attempt to get a result against the agent fraternity. The solid evidence may mean that it is a financially hard-pressed club who suffer most.