The 12 wise men of the English Football Association (FA) meet here tomorrow to discuss the most high-profile, salacious scandal to rock the national sport. And while top of the mind is the future of England coach Sven-Goran Eriksson, FA’s directors will also have to figure out a way to deal with Faria Alam, the British Asian woman at the heart of the bizarre love triangle. The Bangladeshi-born FA secretary is believed to have turned down an offer of 300,000 pounds to reveal her side of the story and has remained silent so far in the wake of accusations and counter-accusations about the nature of her affairs with Eriksson and Mark Palios, FA chief executive who quit on Monday (there are rumours that Alam had yet another affair with a third senior figure). It is thought that she will use her ‘‘pillow-talk’’ information as leverage for a hefty pay-off from the FA should they decide to sack her this week. Alam (38), whose family moved to the UK from Dhaka, had gone into hiding for the past week since news of the affair broke out in the British national press. ‘‘Silence is golden’’, she is reported to have told a close friend although during the course of her affair, she had kept emails and text messages from 56-year-old Eriksson. The Swede had, until recently, been sharing a mansion in Regent’s Park with his long-term (and long-suffering) Italian partner, Nancy Dell’Olio, a lawyer. The scandal has all the makings of an international soap-opera; and the very British organisation that is the FA has been unable to dampen the growing disaster, turning ‘‘Fariagate’’ into its biggest scandal of recent years. When tabloid revelations emerged that the England manager was having an affair with the five-foot-eight company employee in its Soho Square office, it prompted the FA to issue a denial that any such relationship had taken place. However, in an embarrassing U-turn, the FA was then forced to concede that the affair had in fact taken place and that Eriksson’s position would be discussed at Thursday’s FA board meeting. While London-based Alam is weighing up her future and the lucrative prospects of a ‘‘kiss and tell’’ deal, the furore at the FA has already claimed the positions of Palios, who resigned earlier this week, stating that he had to take responsibility. This followed the offer of resignation from the Director of Communications Colin Gibson, who was ‘‘outed’’ in trying to do a deal with the News of the World to reveal details of the Eriksson-Alam affair on condition that Palios’s name was kept out of the picture. During their three-week affair earlier this year, Palios, a divorced father of five, even took her out as his date to a public dinner that the FA organised in honour of football wives which was held at the Savoy hotel. Alam, who cut a glamorous figure as a former model on the Asian circuit in the early 1990s, was at the time working as a secretary for Palios’s boss, David Davies. When the modelling didn’t take off as she had hoped, she turned instead to computing and secretarial jobs but developed a taste for a lavish lifestyle which included exotic holidays, designer clothes and meals out in the capital’s society restaurants such as The Ivy and The Avenue. Her vivacious, flirty personality — combined with a love of short skirts — has led her into a life far removed from that which her strict Muslim family had in mind. Related Story
