Manchester City fans are used to being robbed, but using the logical argument that fans' payments for tickets help fund players' wages, now they've been well and truly left out of pocket. A report I've just heard on Five Live claims two bank employees in Manchester have been found guilty of syphoning off funds from the bank accounts of three players.

Of course there's no real surprise there. If you're a crooked bank employee then footballers are probably the number one target. Your average Premiership player isn't going to miss a small slice of their five-figure weekly pay packet. What I found amusing was the targets themselves - I expect most City fans would respond with 'who?' if told the names. One was Daniel Van Buyten, a defender who spent a couple of months on loan two years ago before going back to join Hamburg. Another was Djamel Belmadi, also a loan signing before Van Buyten, who featured in at best a handful of games. The third player, Vicente Vuoso, was signed by Kevin Keegan for £3,500,000 and sold for pennies three years later, having never played for the first team and spent most of his time back out on loan in South America.

These are players who weren't necessarily bad - Van Buyten was a good player and a lot of fans hoped we'd sign him permanently - but they're by no means identified with the club now. Which suggests, of course, that the bank employees knew what they were doing, targeting foreign loan signings who were only going to be in Britain for a short period of time. They'd be unlikely to keep a close eye on what happened to their bank accounts. That's more the responsibility of a club employee who takes all the players' bills, accounts and other matters of admin, and keeps on top of them, freeing the players to worry about the football. So the players themselves will leave their accounts in the hands of the club, particularly if they're foreign and only here in the short term. But the club won't really understand precisely what's going on in each account, and they're unlikely to question some (comparatively) small transactions each month. It's the perfect breeding ground for fraud.

I've just found an online version of the report at This Is London (it seems to hardly have been reported online thus far, perhaps Five Live were onto it very early), and some of the figures are astonishing. When Belmadi left the club he also left £230,000 in his English account. That's a stunning amount of cash for a player who was at very best average. Vuoso's fate, being signed for so much money and never playing for the team, means he's regarded with particularly mixed emotions by fans - I wouldn't be surprised if some people want a statue of the bank workers put up in their honour for stealing some cash back!

Also in the news, a number 153 bus went out of control in London last night, ploughing into Borders and Sainsbury's in Islington. Looks like a bendy bus from the photo. Would never have happened on a Routemaster - it'd have gone right through Borders instead of, to quote the Channel 4 News report, 'rebounding'.

Meanwhile, there's a shark being jumped over in the US. The Simpsons' production team apparently want Ricky Gervais, who's just penned a show for them, back as a regular character. I sense the bitter scent of overexposure on the horizon (Extras having been no showstopping success, if we're honest). I'm particularly concerned that Catherine 'entirely unfunny' Tate and Little Britain are also wanted by Simpsons' creator Matt Groening as future guest stars. The consensus seems to be that Little Britain's third series is mere shadow of its former self; introducing them to The Simpsons feels too much like a marriage of tired formats, like blowing on a burnt-out match to make it glow again.