Sam Allardyce: England manager fears he will be sacked in next 24 hours, after crisis FA talks at Wembley

Sam Allardyce fears he will be sacked as England manager within the next 24 hours, having spent the day fighting to save his job in crisis talks with the Football Association.

Allardyce was summoned to Wembley by FA chief executive Martin Glenn on Tuesday morning after being the subject of a sting by the Daily Telegraph in which the 61-year-old was secretly filmed discussing how to ‘get around’ the organisation’s rules prohibiting the third-party ownership of players.

The former Bolton, Newcastle, Blackburn and West Ham manager also spoke about the prospect of earning £400,000 in consultancy fees from a fictitious Far East company aiming to become involved in football.

While Allardyce appears to have stopped of breaking any rules or regulations, the FA hierarchy are understood to be furious at the damage caused to the organisation’s reputation by the England manager’s actions.

Sources close to Allardyce, who had been due to announce his squad for the forthcoming World Cup qualifiers against Malta and Slovenia on Sunday, believe he is guilty of nothing more than naivety, but he himself believes that he is now fighting a losing battle to keep his job. It is possible that he may resign rather than be sacked. His departure is likely to mean the current under-21s manager Gareth Southgate stepping into the breach on an interim basis for the qualifiers against Malta at Wembley on Saturday week and in Slovenia three days later.

Allardyce, Glenn and FA chairman Greg Clarke left Wembley on Tuesday evening following lengthy talks without commenting on the situation.

Having insisted during the secret filming that he would have to consult the FA before agreeing to any involvement with the Far East company, Allardyce had been hopeful that this would play in his favour when meeting Glenn and Clarke. But with the FA facing pressure to uphold the integrity of the game, Allardyce is now fearing the worst, just 67 days after being appointed to his dream job.

Allardyce's former boss, West Ham vice-chairman Karren Brady, who worked with him at Upton Park between 2011 and 2015, has said she was "saddened and disappointed" at the revelations. "This is a man who spent his whole life trying to get that job and got it in his 60s," she told the BBC. "And what a great shame if he loses that job through non-footballing reasons. And I think he'll be disappointed in himself.

One of the associates of Allardyce who arranged the meeting, the one-time Manchester United trainee player Scott McGarvey, said through his solicitor that he was adamant he had not engaged in any wrongdoing.

Allardyce was recorded telling McGarvey he had "slipped up" by talking in his presence about giving players "a few grand" to help recruit their peers to a sports management company. That would be a breach of Football Association regulations which state that agents may not "offer or seek to offer any consideration of any kind" to players in return for any "benefit" or "service" in relation to promoting their business.

But Graham Small, a partner at Manchester-based JMW Solicitors, representing McGarvey, said his client had been “eager to impress what he believed to be prospective employers and, in doing so, had perhaps embellished certain comments made during the meetings in question.

Employment law specialists believe that the FA would be legally within their rights to dismiss Allardyce. Encouraging or condoning a breach of the FA’s third party ownership rules - as Allardyce has done - would “fundamentally undermine the trust and confidence” between himself and the governing body, which would be grounds for summary dismissal with no pay-off, said Joseph Bryan of the Littleton barristers’