Why DID the police arrest special agent McKay?

Players, Redknapp said, are not used to being paid by their agents and, after revealing the line of questioning he faced at Chichester police station to members of his Portsmouth squad, he said they had all asked him for McKay's number.

Only time will tell if McKay — and indeed the other four men who were arrested this week — is guilty of anything, but there does appear to be a recurring theme developing in this saga.

According to Redknapp yesterday, the economic crime unit at the City of London police were interested in a payment McKay may have made to Amdy Faye when the midfielder completed his move from Portsmouth to Newcastle.

Redknapp said it had nothing to do with him, not least because he was not even Portsmouth's manager when the transfer was completed, but insisted that an alleged transaction between the player and the agent was all they wanted to know about.

What was interesting, though, was how strikingly similar it was to events that surrounded the arrest of Tottenham's Pascal Chimbonda in September.

The City of London police were also curious about the full back's move from Bastia to Wigan as well as the renegotiation of a contract in his first season at the club.

When McKay responded, he tried to dismiss it as confusion over a payment he had made to Chimbonda. 'Pascal had just joined Spurs and was a bit short at the time, so I gave him some money,' said the Scot. 'He rang me up and asked if I could lend him £18,000, so I said "no problem, just come and get it". I did not want to give him cash so it was a cheque and he signed a bit of paper for it. They should really be calling me Father Christmas.'

He does sound wonderful. Generous with money and advice. No wonder Joey Barton walked away from one of the most reputable sports management companies in Europe to team up with the then Monacobased wheeler-dealer. Yesterday McKay refused to comment on developments in the wake of his own arrest. 'I don't speak to the Daily Mail,' he said.

But an agent who once boasted he made more than £750,000 from one phone call — it concerned Nicolas Anelka's transfer from Paris Saint- Germain to Manchester City — now seems as fascinating to the police as he could be to the players at Fratton Park.