Business of Sport: Wayne Rooney may be on £50,000 a week but his agents also picked up a nice little earner as well this week: £1.5 million in fees, to be exact.
Everton will receive a guaranteed £23 million if Rooney remains a United player until June 30th, 2007, plus £1 million if United win the Champions League, £500,000 if United win the Premiership and £150,000 if United win the FA Cup.
The agreement between the Government, the Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU) and the Football Association of Ireland (FAI) on the redevelopment of Lansdowne Road was signed this week.
Under its terms, the new Lansdowne Road Stadium Development Company Ltd, incorporated by the IRFU and FAI, will build and run the new €300-million stadium. The Government will invest €191m, the IRFU €68m and the FAI €33m.
Television advertising is returning to the US Masters from 2005. The Augusta chairman, Hootie Johnson, dropped the commercials two years ago after Martha Burk and friends lobbied companies, claiming their sponsorship was a veiled endorsement for sex discrimination. But ExxonMobil, IBM and SBC Communications have agreed to run the gauntlet of Burk's wrath by providing four minutes of commercials hourly.
Balco had its Victor Conte, the intrigue and corruption, multi-millionaire athletes signing on the dotted line, and at the heart of it all one laboratory on the west coast of America staying one step ahead of the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA) - until Trevor Graham sent the syringe with THG to the United States Anti Doping Agency (USADA).
Thus track and field strove again for rehabilitation, and while some may feel every positive finding suggests a step back, in truth the momentum is forward. But yes, things will get worse before they can get better.
You could say the same for horse racing, again in the dock after the arrest with 15 others last Wednesday of six-time champion jockey Kieren Fallon amid what some are saying may be the most significant betting scandal of all.
People may scoff at comments from WADA that they are catching up on the drug cheats but for Dick Pound, the discovery of THG and the investigation into Conte's Balco laboratories, along with the banning of several athletic superstars, all point to progress. Sport, he argues, is catching up in scientific terms. Progress is progress no matter how negative the headlines.
Likewise in horse racing. The fallout may be widespread and the headlines negative, but if at the end of it racing is seen to have cleaned up its proverbial stables, the sport can, like Pound and WADA, claim to be headed in the right direction and following best practice.
Racing is playing catch-up. The rise of internet betting exchanges that allow the punter to back against winning has opened up a whole new field of potential skulduggery.
Since its launch four years ago, Betfair, the leading betting exchange, has grown into a behemoth dealing with 500,000 bets a day and turnover of €75 million each week. With inside information on, say, a horse's illness, a punter could make a killing by laying against that horse and creaming off other, unsuspecting punters.
Kieren Fallon's arrest grabbed the headlines but the police investigations centre on another of those arrested, Yorkshire-based businessman Miles Rodgers. Rodgers, the founder and former director of Platinum Racing, was warned off by the Jockey Club for two years in April after being found guilty of laying two of the club's horses on the betting exchange when both finished well beaten. It is also understood he layed the Kieren Fallon-ridden Ballinger Ridge when it lost in controversial circumstances at Lingfield in March.
But it was Rodgers's Betfair account with its turnover last year of €6 million, ranking it in the top one per cent of Betfair's accounts in terms of volume, that aroused the most suspicion and led to the arrests last week. Fallon's arrest, according to his solicitor, related to "a meeting with an individual (Miles Rodgers) who Kieren Fallon has met on one occasion, and whose name Kieren Fallon did not even know at the time of the meeting."
The seriousness of the alleged scandal was highlighted by the numbers of police involved - 130 swooping simultaneously on 19 addresses - the single biggest police operation in British racing.
Traditional bookmakers have been quick to point out that exchanges are to blame for much of the scandal,
"Without wishing to anticipate the charges those arrested may face, the Association of British Bookmakers (ABB) has consistently warned the Government and the Jockey Club that the ability of betting exchange customers to act as unlicensed bookmakers without revealing their identities to punters is the equivalent of the sport sitting on a smouldering powder keg," said a spokesman.
And though Betfair pointed out it was their information about suspicious betting patterns that led to the arrests, the ABB countered, "For the betting exchanges to say that cases of corruption would not be identified but for their audit trails is akin to a householder leaving his doors and windows wide open and then claiming credit for reporting a burglary . . . the reality is that the ability to lay horses to lose offers a far easier opportunity to the criminal than attempting to arrange for a certain horse to win."
While criticisms of the exchanges abound, a memorandum of understanding was signed with the Jockey Club in June, 2003, which allows the Jockey Club access to Betfair's records. The paper trail being left by punters is now being scrutinised and finally action is being taken.
This week may have been a bad one for racing and the exchanges, but it was John McCririck, the TV racing pundit, who summed it up succinctly: "In the old days the bookmakers kept very quiet and protected the confidentiality of their clients. It's good news that something is being done."
Just as the Balco investigation tore apart secret dealings in athletics, so too this week may be seen as something of a watershed for racing. There may be darker days ahead but in truth it also means the dawn can't be too far away.
