Top bosses in bungs shame

Two current Premier League managers will be accused of taking bungs and named in a forthcoming expose of transfer dealing in football.

BBC lawyers are looking at the material gathered by the undercover Panorama investigation into football agents - and at the responses from those under suspicion - before a final cut is approved for transmission a week tomorrow.

But naming the two high-profile bosses accused of wrongdoing would be a sensational development in the ongoing debate about the level of malpractice in English football. Itwould further damage the game's reputation, with Lord Stevens about to reveal the preliminary findings of the Premier League inquiry into alleged financial impropriety.

The two managers, whose identities are known to The Mail on Sunday, are consulting their lawyers about the Panorama programme and will vigorously defend their reputations. Their names are revealed by a leading agent, who was secretly filmed explaining which bosses would be receptive to financial inducements.

Early this year, Premier League chief executive Richard Scudamore commissioned their inquiry into financial wrongdoing after claims made by former England coach Sven Goran Eriksson.

Former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Lord Stevens is writing the preliminary report, due to be completed at the end of this month, and is expected to raise serious questions about more than 50 deals which took place in the two years from January 2004 which he was mandated to investigate.

Luton manager Mike Newell, whose allegations helped to spark the Stevens probe, expects the inquiry to expose corruption.

'I have the feeling that if there was nothing to be found he would have said so by now,' said Newell.