Johnny Phillips: Wolves' openness is refreshing to see

The latest tale concerns the investment in Telford United that has seen former Wolves coach Rob Edwards take charge of the National North club, with interim chairman Andy Pryce confirming Telford are taking a new approach to running the club.

Quite rightly, journalists will be looking into where the investment has come from and what will change about the ongoing relationship between Wolves and the New Bucks Head club – a relationship that has been in place for many years.

At a national level, Wolves have become fodder for a type of journalism that falls into two categories.

There was the jingoistic tabloid tub-thumping Daily Mirror piece written by Andy Dunn when Nuno Espirito Santo was appointed manager that asked what dear old Sir Jack would have made of it all.

Then there was the recent investigative broadsheet reporting of David Conn in The Guardian delving forensically into the club’s transfer activity. All roads lead back to Jorges Mendes of course.

The methods and motives of Fosun and Mendes are justifiably being questioned but there is also an undertone to this wider national reporting that hints at a dark and shadowy world where supporters are being hoodwinked. In fact, the exact opposite is true. Never before has there been such transparency in the club’s behaviour.

It is not right that vast sums of money are being taken out of the game by agents, but that is a completely different matter. The Football Association have rules that clubs and agents must obey. Wolves are not falling foul of these and Mendes is very successful at what he does.

To address the suggestions they are acting improperly, consider this. Given Mendes’s standing in world football, do you really think he would fall foul of laws and regulations just to get an ex-Dundee United player on to Wolves’ books and risk losing his representation of Ronaldo and Jose Mourinho in the process?

The paper trail of transactions has never been more visible. The Guardian’s work was made a lot easier by a simple click on the FA’s website. There in black and white is a record of every transfer, with a list of the intermediaries and agents used on both sides.

Look, too, at the explosion of social and mainstream media in this digital age. Professional news-gathering organisations and supporters running their own ventures are joined together with global counterparts making it far more difficult to conceal anything.

This is not to say that there is no skulduggery in modern football, but it is a lot harder for activities to go unchecked. Gone are the days of popping down to the local motorway service station car park with a brown paper bag full of cash in order to poach a left-back.

What was striking about the press conference to announce Nuno’s appointment was the openness with which both he and managing director Laurie Dalrymple dealt with the steady stream of questions about Mendes’s role at the club. Would an English manager be subjected to this examination? Good luck to the journalist asking Mick McCarthy who his favoured agent is – and all managers have them, by the way – next time he sits down to start a new job.

The questions were fair and so were the answers, although neither author of those two national newspaper pieces chose to be in attendance.

The Mirror’s headline called the Wolves ‘project’ a ‘grim step’. Both articles harked back to former regimes at the club, but it is worth examining two occasions when the culture was different to today.

In 1999, owner Sir Jack Hayward sued his Jonathan, then chairman, for alleged financial irregularities over the movement of a total of £237,400 at the club.

Wolves’ local press reporter at the time, David Instone, recalls being shocked and saddened at the story of a family at war. It was a big deal in the national press too but the story came to a close when the matter was settled out of court.

That shouldn’t have been the end of it but no examination of how the club was run or what happened to the money followed.

“There was genuine affection with Sir Jack. He didn’t get everything right and didn’t bring the on-field success everyone expected,” Instone, his biographer, recalls. “But I think he was cut more slack because of who he was. He had points in the bank whereas Fosun don’t have that.”

In 2011, then-owner Steve Morgan was allowed to purchase green belt land and develop a luxury housing estate on it. There were tangible benefits for the club, Wolverhampton University and a local school, but how easily a green belt site was allowed to be developed when there was plenty of brownfield land in the city available and in far greater need of regeneration was surprising.

Dressed up as much-needed housing, Morgan’s development was in fact homes for the privileged few. This is not to say planning permission shouldn’t have been awarded, but only at local level was this properly scrutinised.

Today Jeff Shi couldn’t so much as pop down to The Clarendon for a pint of Banks’s Mild without someone wanting to know where the money came from. Which is great for supporters seeking to be informed. Fosun and Mendes are conducting their business in an as enlightened a time as there has been. Compared to what has gone before, we are living in football’s era of Glasnost.