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03rd Oct 2016

The FA’s England advert in the Wembley programme couldn’t have gone any worse

Ben Kenyon

The FA aren’t having much luck lately.

It appears like its can of worms after miserable can of worms right now, so surely they deserved a bit of a break?

Nope. Yet more bad fortune has been stuck on the pile.

FA football chiefs haven’t had the greatest of weeks as revelations and allegations with a damning Daily Telegraph undercover investigation into football corruption splashing embarrassing revelations and allegations across the papers which haven’t exactly cast the beautiful game in the most flattering of lights.

England boss Sam Allardyce was the first and most high profile casualty of this media sting, with the FA having to end his contract by mutual consent just 67 days into the job.

It’s not the best look for the national game when the manager is caught on camera seemingly discussing how to bypass the FA’s third party player ownership rules and apparently negotiating a £400,000 speaking engagement deal with supposed Far Eastern businessmen, who were actually undercover reporters.

Then it came out that they had to pay him a reported £1m payout barely three months after shelling out £3.5m to his former club Sunderland to secure his services.

As if that all wasn’t bad enough, then The Sun reported that a haul of commemorative Allardyce t-shirts had to be binned at a cost of £40,000.

So as the story slipped off the front pages, it must have provided some welcome respite for red faced England chiefs in the FA.

That was until the Wembley programme was circulated for the NFL game between the Jacksonville Jaguars and the Indianapolis Colts at the home of English football.

Inside was a full page advert trumpeting Allardyce’s England before their World Cup qualifier against Malta, which would have been great had it not been for the utter shitstorm around the former Three Lions boss of the past seven days.

Sadly, we imagine the programme for the event will have been put together and printed long before the shit over Allardyce hit the fan.

But it will be another kick in the balls to see the unfortunate advert in print with a big Sam Allardyce quote saying ‘The journey starts with us all pulling together.’

The timing was awful. When will this nightmare end?

Catch up with the latest episode of Football Friday Live right here…