By Jonathan Legard BBC Radio Five Live Football Correspondent

There will have been legions listening to Lord Stevens who will claim that Inspector Clouseau could have done a more effective job of investigating the workings of the British transfer system.

If this is the long arm of the "leahw" (sorry, law), no wonder football has escaped rigorous regulation.

His Lordship's tantalising "wait and see" mantra in October now appears little more than a frustrating platitude, pending the results of further detective work into the 17 remaining transfers and the eight mysterious leading agents who've so far refused to play ball with the Quest team.

And yet, how realistic were expectations that some big fish would be hooked and that long-held suspicions about rampant corruption in a money-mad Premiership would be satisfied?

Maybe we need to believe what his Lordship admitted during his presentation: "The game is clean"

If the previous bungs inquiry panel took four years to complete its findings and largely drew a blank, why should Lord Stevens and his specialist investigators necessarily have uncovered evidence of wrong-doing in less than a quarter of that time?

Their methods of inquiry will have been more sophisticated but the techniques of financial concealment have also become more complex.

As with the battle against drugs in sport, nothing succeeds like a whistleblower, and so far Lord Stevens has been whistling in the wind.

Or maybe, just maybe, we need to believe what his Lordship admitted during his presentation: "The game, in relation to the majority of what we have seen, is clean."

Those words will never convince the cynics nor silence the whisperers but his damning criticism of the football authorities reveal precisely why the rumour and innuendo about a so-called bung culture have persisted for so long.

Stevens' report should be a watershed for football

"The accounting and monitoring of the clubs is in a mess," he said.

Many of the recommendations made by the 1997 inquiry team have not been adopted.

Clubs broke transfer rules because they didn't understand them. Invoices and payments didn't add up.

There was significant conflict of interest, with one agent acting for two clubs and a player in one single transfer.

And the FA "failed to monitor in any detailed or systematic way the arrangements connected to transfers during the inquiry period."

Is it any wonder that allegations about bungs and brown envelopes gather momentum amid such a laissez-faire environment?

The FA's one-time, one man band compliance department in the shape of Graham Bean never had a hope of keeping track of disciplinary misdemeanours, never mind scoring some notable victories.

I'm told that previous efforts to boost the unit were thwarted by the very officials now welcoming Lord Stevens' recommendations.

Funny old game, isn't it?

Quite possibly no names will ever be exposed, and no charges ever brought because transfer trails are so cleverly and minutely disguised.

Football's world is frequently impenetrable to the outsider, and the increasing involvement of foreign investors threatens to muddy the waters even further.

But that should not prevent Lord Stevens' report becoming a watershed and a blueprint for the way football does its business in the future.