Best analysis: Sam Allardyce 'a greedy old fool', but 'there was no smoking gun'

We round up the best of the reaction and analysis to the departure of the England manager.

"Managing the England football team is more than a job. The incumbent is not merely responsible for the performance of the national team of the country that invented the game, he is a figurehead and standard-bearer for a sport that stirs emotions to unique depths. He is a leader, or should be.

"Sam Allardyce has manifestly failed to live up to the standards expected of an England manager. His willingness to engage in detailed conversations with people he believed represented wealthy foreign business interests about how to get around football’s rules show that he is not the man to champion probity and honesty in the game. It is right that he has gone.

"Mr Allardyce’s early departure from the job is necessary, but not sufficient, to address the deep and troubling problems in football identified by this newspaper’s investigations. Those problems are partly organisational and partly cultural…

"This affair is about much more than one manager’s career. Confidence in football as a whole hangs in the balance. The river of money that flows from fans’ pockets into the professional game may not run forever. The FA and the clubs have much to lose if they fail to recognise what is at stake here."

"I am absolutely stunned at the catastrophic misjudgement from Sam Allardyce. To even agree to sit in a room with those guys is a huge error. He’s clearly been badly advised. Did none of his supposedly professional advisers think this was a bad idea?

"But Sam is 61 years old. He is a big boy. He has been around football all his life and knows how the game works. To make such a staggering error of judgement, you can’t look at anybody else but yourself…

"It beggars belief that he would put himself in that position and, in the end, he left the FA with no choice…

"I am really sad and I am really angry. I am disappointed that football at the highest level is so scarred by this unsavoury underbelly driven by greed…

"I thought we had hit rock bottom after the Euros in the summer. How could things get any worse than that humiliating defeat to Iceland?

"But now look at us. English football is a complete laughing stock — the laughing stock of world football."

"If you want to be the England manager you have to be whiter than white and the Telegraph investigation shows he wasn't. The FA didn't have any option but to take the decision they did.

"This guy is being paid around £3m a year. Why was he grubbing around trying to find £400,000 from somewhere? If he hadn't agreed to go he would have been fired and I think rightly so."

"He is a clot, that’s for sure. If you have followed Allardyce’s career, the infamous Panorama documentary and the chequered past of his agent, Mark Curtis, it is not any surprise the man the FA appointed in July was ripe for a newspaper sting… He had his chance, he blew it and one of the most arrogant men in the business will have a long time to mull over what he should have done differently.

"Whether that means he deserved to lose his job is another matter entirely and, even as a non-Allardyce fan, having questioned his relationship with Curtis more than once, it is still not entirely straightforward understanding what the FA has seen in those secretly taped recordings to warrant the guillotine… He made it absolutely clear that before he committed to anything he would have to run everything by the FA.

"What, you might wonder, was the greedy old fool, already on a £3m‑a‑year contract, doing hawking himself around a couple of weeks after getting the England job? But that is the nature of the business, whether you like it or not. Managers exploit their position for speaking engagements, public appearances and other commercial activities, and Allardyce is not the only one who would be tempted by £400,000…

"Even with a man’s P45 on the way, it is difficult to find the killer line, no matter how many times you read it…. The whole thing is a mess and, at the heart of it, the damage to Allardyce’s professional reputation is irretrievable."

"It is not just mistaken, but morally egregious, to take private words spoken in a Mayfair hotel, to people who pretended to be businessmen — a few moments in a four-hour chat where you are being covertly incited to say anything that might look bad on the front page of a newspaper — and say: 'He must be sacked'...

"It looks as if he was pushed. He should not have been. Not according to any reasonable interpretation of a conversation with people to whom he had been introduced by a close friend. They were not strangers, as has been claimed, as if Allardyce bumped into them in a bar. They had cultivated Allardyce as a close contact...

"People are uneasy about his apparent greed, but this is another red herring. It would have been up to his employer to determine whether any additional work might have distracted him from his day job and Allardyce had agreed to check with the FA. When an individual may be sacked for discussing a hypothetical contract which he may not, on further reflection, even have entered into and which would probably have been vetoed by the FA anyway, you are in the territory of a witch-hunt...

"As for those who claim that he was encouraging” others to break these rules, this doesn’t stack up, either... This wasn’t a smoking gun; it was smoke and mirrors..."

"People should be sacked for what they say in private only if they breach a high bar of wrongdoing. The former England manager, on the basis of what we have seen so far, didn’t come close. That he has gone says little about football, but very much about the debauchment of our public values. The FA should have stood by its man."

"If this is the darkest day of Allardyce's career, then it is also a desperate low for the Football Association as the man appointed to take England into the future leaves after just 90 minutes of World Cup qualifying action in Slovakia…

"Sam Allardyce is an acquired taste to many, both as a 'call a spade a spade' personality and a manager whose tactics have often been decried by his detractors as basic and over-physical. It is a label that irks the man who once claimed if his name was 'Allardici' he would be more revered - and his England vision, outlined during his interview at FA board member David Gill's house in July, is believed to have been perceptive and modern.

"So it will have been with a heavy heart that the FA's hierarchy listened to Allardyce at Wembley on Tuesday afternoon before parting ways with the manager they thought would lift the post-Euro 2016 gloom of the Hodgson era. If the FA felt there was any justification for keeping Allardyce, it would surely have given him the benefit of the doubt. There will have been no serious appetite for the decision that was eventually taken unless it was unavoidable… the FA must be credible, show leadership and demonstrate authority - and it was decided Allardyce could not stay under those circumstances."

"He didn’t get a tournament, he didn’t get a second game. Hell, Sam Allardyce didn’t even get to walk out at Wembley just once as England manager. A pathetic figure, undone by quite gratuitous greed and weakness, his only legacy is that the number 67 in English football will now resonate with almost the force of 66. The year England won the World Cup: 66. The number of days Allardyce lasted as England manager: 67…

"If Allardyce had got England to the World Cup finals in Russia, he would in all likelihood have been the best rewarded manager there. Why exactly was he looking to leverage that position so soon? Why wasn’t the challenge, the honour and prestige, not to mention the £3million salary, sufficient?...

"If the Football Association now use the hiatus as a means to land Arsene Wenger, some may even regard it as being for the best. What can never recover, though, is the carefully constructed myth of ‘Big’ Sam Allardyce. The man we fondly, foolishly, imagined would have done the England job for nothing…

"Allardyce was English football’s boy done good. He hadn’t managed elite clubs, or too many elite players, but he was a down-to-earth, straight-talking product of our game. His appointment was a triumph for the little man, for the idea that the Bolton manager could be as sharp as Jose Mourinho, given the chance. Allardyce wasn’t an imported mercenary, here for the money like Sven Goran Eriksson or Fabio Capello. He hadn’t been around the block with Switzerland and Iceland like Hodgson. Allardyce, we thought, was different. England was his calling, his duty. It turns out he loved something even more… Allardyce didn’t even wait for a debut fixture in Slovakia before seeking to mine lucrative spin-offs."

"It was an accident waiting to happen, and the FA can’t say they weren’t warned. The men who appointed Sam Allardyce as England manager will have sifted through the wreckage of a newspaper sting and asked ­themselves: 'Was this entirely out of character? Were people telling us we were risking a scenario like this?'

"And when they answered those questions, they were left with no choice but to pull the trigger on Allardyce’s England reign after just 67 days. Now chief executive Martin Glenn and technical director Dan Ashworth should do the decent thing and resign after making a complete Horlicks of their most important appointment… The blame lies squarely at their own door…

"Allardyce’s tendency to shoot his mouth off and brag indiscreetly should not have escaped the FA’s due diligence. And it is that characteristic which has proved his downfall...

"If, as we were led to believe at his tear-stained unveiling, this really was Allardyce’s dream job, then £3million was clearly not his dream salary. He and agent Mark Curtis saw the England job as an opportunity to earn more – as other Three Lions bosses have done in the past.

"But anyone who has ever attended an Allardyce press conference might have wondered whether 400 grand for a speaking gig might have been too good to be true.

"Turns out it was."