Conflict of interests?

For a year now it has all been on the record – but without a single official English voice of protest.

It has been known that some of the most respected managers in football, including Sir Bobby Robson, Martin O'Neill, Graeme Souness and Kevin Keegan have held significant shareholdings in the company of the super-agent, Paul Stretford.

Peter Reid, who was yesterday appointed manager of financially-shattered Leeds United, and a sometime shareholder in Stretford's Proactive Group, signed the Rangers player, Claudio Reyna, a client of Stretford. He also bought the Stretford players Carsten Fredgaard, a Dane, and Milton Nuñez, a Honduran, for a combined total of more than £4m. They played a total of 45 minutes for Sunderland.

John Gregory, who was yesterday sacked by Derby County, is another shareholder and close friend of Stretford. Gregory signed Warren Barton of Newcastle United, whose chairman Freddy Shepherd's son, Kenny, has been employed by Stretford and has operated from an office in St James' Park.

None of this had led to accusations or even suggestions of conflict of interest – no more than official questioning of the principle involved in the sons of leading managers like Sir Alex Ferguson, Paul Hart, Sam Allardyce and Trevor Francis working as player agents in the game. More surprising, though, is the acceptance of customs that would be automatically banned in other branches of business life.

Recently the affairs of the teenage prodigy Wayne Rooney were taken over by Proactive, which has announced that it has as many as seven employees working to exploit the boy's image and earning capacity. He was previously the client of a local agent.

Michael Dunford, chief executive of Everton, formerly held 40,000 Proactive shares. Again, there has been no official reaction to the fact that a key employee of Everton recently held a stake in the company which may have made one of its most spectacular coups. That Dunford decided to part with his shares is perhaps a tribute to his sense of potential misinterpretation of his situation. It said nothing for the administrators of football who have no safeguards against such embarrassment.

Yesterday, however, a voice was heard to say: "The situation in English football just cannot carry on. Anywhere else, in any other walk of life, it just wouldn't be allowed, and we have told Fifa that. They are looking into it, and we are confident that they will act."

Sadly, the voice was not English. It belonged to Mats Oland, leader of the Danish Players' Association and a former full-back with FC Copenhagen. He told The Independent: "We have been in talks with the Danish Football Federation constantly and back their decision to raise the matter with Fifa. There have been talks with Fifa and they have promised an investigation. It has to happen. We have more than 80 Danish players signed up with Paul Stretford – and then we hear of the case of Morten Skouba and Borussia Mönchangladbach."

This week the Danish journalist Nils-Christian Jung revealed that Skouba, who moved to the German club in a £2m deal, was represented by Karsten Aabrink and that the club's negotiator was Soren Lerby. Both are employees of Proactive – and shareholders.

The situation was not far removed from Souness's £8m investment in Andy Cole of Manchester United. Cole is another Stretford client. The difference is that while the long list of managerial shareholders in Stretford's company, first revealed by BBC Radio reporters, has not raised a flicker of doubt in official quarters here, Jung's revelations caused outrage in Danish football circles.

Fleming Ostergaard, chairman of FC Copenhagen, said: "We have to do something about this situation. I've never understood how the boards of British football clubs have put up with this. It couldn't happen in Denmark."

Oland and Jim Stjerne Hansen, general secretary of the Danish Football Federation, immediately met to discuss the implications of the Skouba case – and were also fuelled by reports in Denmark that their national goalkeeper, Thomas Sorensen of Sunderland, would be replacing Peter Schmeichel at Manchester City, where manager Keegan holds 200,000 Proactive shares. Sorensen is a Proactive client and has 300,000 shares.

Lars Berendt, head of communications for the Danish Football Federation, says: "I want to emphasise that we don't have any vendetta against a particular agent. What we have done is ask Fifa to look into the matter and they have agreed. We are particularly concerned about the principle of managers of clubs holding shares in the company of an agent."

Oland points out that under Article 14 of Fifa regulations individual federations have the power to come up with stronger rules according to their view of business ethics – and their own laws. "A licensed agent in Denmark is required," he reports, "to represent only one set of interests. It is just inconceivable to us that it could be otherwise. Recently we sent a file to the law office which regularly does work for us. It concerned a company who we believed had been illegally using the names of several of our members to promote their business. It was a fairly straightforward matter but the following day we had the file returned with a note to say that the law firm had represented the company in some matter quite a number of years ago. But they thought that represented a conflict of interest. I suppose it was standard good business practice."

What seemed clear enough yesterday was that the lack of such fineness of feeling in English football had finally come under a properly critical gaze – if not a full-scale Viking attack. Indeed, as the English Football Association floundered to find a replacement for its ousted chief executive, Adam Crozier, who was bulldozed out of office by the Premiership power brokers earlier this season, there was an increasing sense that the time for independent regulation could no longer be much delayed.

Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the Professional Footballers' Association, said that there was no question about the need for independent regulation. "We've been arguing for an independent compliance unit for more than 10 years – when we had our fight with the Premiership over TV money, and threatened to strike, I argued that agents had taken more out of football in one year than the PFA had done in its entire history.

"But where did all the cries for a compliance unit finish up? With a task force headed by David Mellor. Let's face it, on this issue all we have seen is a series of white flags. Football's task force has been about as potent as the Press Council, and I don't suppose I need to say much more than that."

Kate Hoey, the former sports minister, said: "The business of agents acting for players and clubs has been going on for a long time and it is a disgrace. Of course there is a need for independent regulation, but who will impose it? Has the Government got the will to do it? I don't know. But obviously what happens in football wouldn't be allowed to happen in other businesses – and certainly not the City of London."

Last week Proactive issued a statement aimed at dismissing question marks about the propriety of leading club managers holding shares in the company. It said: "The inference that managers would not act in the best interests of their clubs, just because they have a shareholding in Proactive, is offensive to those people concerned.

"Having checked the share register, Proactive Sports Group plc has ascertained that the shareholdings of managers is approximately one per cent of the equity. All investors paid the full price for the shares either through market purchases or at the time of the company's floatation."

Proactive had, apparently, quite missed the point. So too had the English football authorities. There wasn't a sniff of a rotten principle. Except in the state of Denmark.