The way to measure the impact of news- paper stories, and especially pricey multi- part investigations replete with anonymous by-lines and hidden cameras is fallout. What are the effects, both short term and long term?

In the immediate, it is obvious. England will need to get themselves a new national team boss and they may or may not have to give Sam Allardyce a pay-off. And a guy with the same name as the manager of St Johnstone has lost his job over an envelope stuffed with £5000 in cash.

Beyond that, what we have is tons of rumour and outrage. Which is fine, because rumour can lead to further investigation – ideally, by folks with the power to lock people up – and outrage fuels further inquiry.

Except there is one missing ingredient here: evidence of the kind that leads to action and prosecution.

This is where things get problematic. The folks happy to make allegations when filmed with hidden cameras suddenly deny everything and say they were lying to impress prospective clients when confronted on the record.

Pino Pagliara, one of the three intermediaries who named managers who had taken bribes (and in great detail), said he made everything up because he thought it was what the fictitious investors – really, Telegraph reporters in disguise – wanted to hear.

“I had to make sure my argument was compelling,” he told the BBC. “At the end of the day, I got a bit creative.”

Follow his argument through and it amounts to this: these were rich people willing to do something illegal, so I pretended I had done plenty of illegal things to impress them so they would hire me. (Hire him for what? But that’s a whole separate issue.)

Pagliara’s defence is, frankly, laughable. Almost as laughable as how the sting ruined his reputation. (Nope, that was already ruined when he was busted with a quarter of a million Euros in cash in a duffel bag and was banned for five years for match-fixing when he was director of football at Venezia in 2005.)

And yet his denials matter. Because without his co-operation, without Pagliara or others like him providing concrete evidence of the who, what, where, when variety, there is no way anybody can be brought to justice. It would have been a different story if, after being caught on camera, he had said: “Oops, you’re right. I’m sorry. If I go down, let me take others down with me. Here is everything I know, with details and bank statements.”

He didn’t do that. And so the Telegraph, the FA, the police and anybody else wishing to investigate is left with what they had before: rumours and suspicion surrounding certain individuals in the game.

A decade ago, a Panorama documentary raised serious questions and provided concrete evidence of dubious practice. That led to the Stevens Report which, while it may not have led to any convictions, at the very least raised more questions and scared some people straight.

Here, it’s not clear that anything like it will happen. All we have right now is guys rehashing the sort of rumours you can find anywhere on the internet and then telling us they were making it all up. That’s not enough to go on.

And that’s why, Allardyce aside, it doesn’t feel like this investigation will have any sort of lasting impact, other than minor collateral damage.

ONE of the curious things about the investigation is that nearly everybody duped by the Telegraph’s fictitious investors can be traced back to the same two agents: the aforementioned Pagliara and Scott McGarvey.

Everybody they meet – from Allardyce to Leeds United owner Massimo Cellino, from QPR manager Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink to Harry Redknapp – is introduced by either Pagliara or McGarvey.

And this raises a fundamental question. Did they even consider approaching bigger fish than a convicted unlicensed match-fixer and a guy who Allardyce himself described as “desperate” and “down on his luck”?

That seems like a relevant point. Did they even think of trying this with, say, a Jorge Mendes or a Jonathan Barnett or a Paul Stretford?

Surely you would imagine that getting the guy who looks after Jose Mourinho, Gareth Bale or Wayne Rooney to talk about impropriety would be a much bigger coup?

You wonder if they did try and the above agents simply laughed them off – or, as you’d expect a sane person to do, Googled them, found nothing and got suspicious. Or whether they simply leaned on Pagliara and McGarvey because, well, they were low-hanging fruit.

IT has gone under the radar – about as much as anything can go under the radar these days in the Premier League – but if Tottenham beat Manchester City today at White Hart Lane, they will move within a point of the top of the table.

It is early, of course, but with 14 points from their opening six games, this is Tottenham’s best start to a season since 1960-61, which, of course, is when they won 11 in a row as well as the English title.

The curious thing is that it’s all happening quietly, without Spurs playing particularly well, at least relative to last season. Other than Victor Wanyama, the newcomers haven’t contributed much. The nearly £50 million spent on Vincent Janssen and Moussa Sissoko has yielded zero goals and one 90-minute performance each. Hugo Lloris missed two starts through injury, Dele Alli and Christian Eriksen haven’t been overpowering like they were at times last season, Mousa Dembele missed the first five games through suspension and Harry Kane is now injured. They have won just one game by a margin of more than a goal, mostly against unremarkable opposition.

Yet here they are. And that’s significant because this is a side that has got results without playing well, suggesting they can go to the next level or, indeed, the one beyond that.

Today can be a crossroads, especially with a run of three winnable games coming up ahead of the north London derby on November 6. A result – and a good performance – can provide serious momentum and help them jump-start the season.