Sam Allardyce is at the center of embarrassing and potentially damaging revelations that will warrant a Football Association investigation into the new England manager only two months after he took the job.

Allardyce will have to explain to his new employer why he apparently told what he thought were Far East businessmen, not realising they were undercover reporters for the Daily Telegraph, that it was possible to “get round” the rules about third-party player ownership.

The FA has been thrust into the highly embarrassing position of its most important employee saying it was “not a problem” to bypass the rules his own organisation had introduced in 2008. Allardyce, implicated in a Panorama documentary earlier in his management career, tells the reporters he knew of certain agents who were “doing it all the time” and added: “You can still get around it. I mean obviously the big money’s here.”

Allardyce will have to explain whether he was merely giving an honest account of what happened in the sport or if he was advising the “businessmen” to follow those practices, in which case the matter could be serious enough for his position to be in question.