Nobody can say we weren’t warned. Football at its highest level has always been run differently from your average major business and this is hardly the first time that the people who profess to run the sport have turned on a spit of public ridicule. “Beware of the clever, sharp men who are creeping into the game,” William McGregor, founder of the Football League, put it in League Football and the Men Who Made it. And that was in 1909.

It has certainly felt that way watching the Football Association stagger through the various stages of the Mark Sampson debacle and the considerable feat of Martin Glenn’s inadequate regime to add several new layers to a story that already featured racism allegations, hush-money payments and the unmistakable stench of a cover-up going all the way to the top of the organisation.

The new elements that eventually did for Sampson have left the FA in an even greater state of disrepute and, for that, the accident-prone chief executive might just have to understand if the people he humbly described as “the grown-ups in the organisation” – namely himself, the chairman, Greg Clarke, and the technical director, Dan Ashworth – are being chased by headlines asking why they are still in office.

Ashworth, in particular, seems to have his fingerprints everywhere in this story, bearing in mind this was the man who appointed Sampson, who championed him, who exonerated him from Eni Aluko’s complaints and who let it slide, with that stunning lack of curiosity, when the FA’s safeguarding department ruled the now-deposed England Women manager needed to go on an educational course because of his relationship with players at Bristol Academy (now Bristol City Women), the club where he had previously coached.

Even before we get to that part of the fiasco, it seems almost implausible that Ashworth, with his close relationship to Sampson, should be one of the two people to oversee the internal inquiry into Aluko’s allegations. Ashworth’s investigation had cleared Sampson of any wrongdoing and delivered its findings to Aluko before speaking to at least one of the key witnesses. And there are other details that, until now, I have kept back when it comes to the reasons, to put it bluntly, why the Professional Footballers’ Association has complained to the FA that the process involving Ashworth is “not a genuine search for the truth” and “designed to close down the complaint and absolve Mark Sampson”. Other people can decide if Ashworth should stay or go but the picture it creates is unedifying, to say the least, and it leaves a stain that will be difficult to wash out.

It certainly feels typical of this story to discover that Ashworth and the FA’s human resources director, Rachel Brace, admitted they had cleared Sampson of making a racial comment towards Drew Spence at the China Cup in 2015 without actually watching the video recording of the relevant meeting. That admission is described as “nothing short of incredible” within the PFA, whose firm belief is that Aluko has been the victim of an almighty stitch-up, and leaves a burning question about why Ashworth and Brace were so quick to absolve their colleague without more serious investigations.

But there is more. For starters, Ashworth’s response when Aluko emailed him in June last year to set out her concerns about her own treatment and the incident involving Spence. Two months later, Aluko sent a follow-up to ask why he had not replied and Ashworth claimed he had never received the email. The PFA’s view is that Ashworth’s explanation “lacks credibility and is not accepted as being genuine”. Nobody else on the email chain lost it to cyberspace.

Ashworth was the man who wanted Aluko, as an “iconic England player”, to take part in the FA’s culture review and promised it was an entirely confidential process. It was Ashworth who told her it was a mere coincidence when, within two weeks, her 11-year, 102-cap England career was in effect ended for what Sampson called “unLioness behaviour”.

Ashworth was at the meeting with Aluko when coincidence struck again and the follow-up emails the next day – and it really is some coincidence, this – included notification that her work as a sports lawyer was to be the subject of a separate FA investigation. Ashworth was one of the people the PFA was referring to when it complained of “a sham which was not designed to establish the truth but intended to protect Mark Sampson”. Ashworth is, in short, up to his neck in this story.

He certainly has a lot of explaining to do because, in a normal business, these are the kind of allegations that might warrant an investigation of their own. And, of course, the Aluko element is now only part of the story.

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Ashworth was one of the executives who never made it his business to find out more when Sampson was sent on an educational course after a safeguarding investigation lasting almost a year. Ashworth was, however, responsible for the decision to renew Sampson’s contract eight months later. He was also on the selection panel in 2013 that apparently changed the job specification to line up with Sampson’s CV (removing the stipulation that candidates must have a professional licence and international experience) and has been there, virtually every step of the way, until the press conference to announce his colleague’s sacking.

At that stage, Ashworth was nowhere to be seen, handily avoiding questions about what he knew and what he had done about it. Glenn and Clarke might have made a pig’s ear of it, too, but at least they were willing to front up.

The surprising part, three days on, is that the details of whatever Sampson did at Bristol, involving what has been described as inappropriate relationships with more than one player, have not yet hit the news stands.

Yet I also suspect I’m not alone in struggling to shake this feeling that it all feels a bit convenient to lose Sampson this way now it is two players, rather than just one, alleging racial comments, with a number of potential witnesses identified and the possibility in the long run that the new evidence might have toppled him anyway.

Sampson’s back was pressed against a cold, unforgiving wall even before all the new elements to this scandal. He had always denied making the Ebola comment about Aluko’s Nigerian relatives or asking Spence, a mixed‑race player, how many times she had been arrested. Yet the case against him is mounting and the bottom line here is that if the verdict had gone against him he would, almost certainly, have been sacked. For an organisation with the FA’s vanity and pomposity, it would have been just about the most excruciating way possible to lose a manager.

As it is, the people at the top of the chain have found a way to pin it on something from Sampson’s previous employment while shaking their heads about what a terrible business it is and congratulating themselves on their apparent belief that the FA has higher moral standards. And yes, I know it may sound cynical, but there has been too much spin and deflection and political manoeuvring to know whether we should take it at face value.

Even now, the FA is struggling to get its story straight, judging by Glenn’s admission that the barrister Katharine Newton had been chosen to oversee the second investigation because the organisation wanted a black woman and the spluttering fury from the FA’s own lawyers, Farrer & Co, when I dared point out they had written to me on 25 August to say that was a horrendous mistruth. Julian Pike, representing the FA, is “quite outstanding .... clever, thoughtful, charming”, according to Chambers UK. Sadly, I must have got him on a bad day when I tried to double-check. “I suggest you reconsider your approach,” was one of the politer lines. “You need to have regard to the facts and not simply seek to give a platform for ill-informed and maliciously motivated theories.” His tone rather changed when he found out the source of this information was the FA’s chief executive. And there, in a nutshell, is your insight into the FA bubble and a blurry, fuddled world where they seem intent on pushing all the doors marked “pull”.

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As for Newton, the most relevant question concerns her ability to get it right now she has reopened her inquiry and finally appeared to realise – hallelujah – that it might be worthwhile to speak to Spence and the potential witnesses. There is, however, a reason why so many journalists keep mistakenly referring to her as a QC when she is, in fact, a junior barrister. A colleague who had made the error explained it rather neatly: “Because it bloody well should have been a QC.”

What troubles me more is the implication from Glenn that it was Spence’s fault the various investigations had, until Friday, never asked her to corroborate what Aluko had told the FA about the China Cup. “If someone has had something said to them, the thing you would expect them to do is raise a complaint,” Glenn volunteered. “The specifics of that complaint could then be dealt with. If you worked your whole life on hearsay, you’d never be able to run a classroom let alone the Football Association.”

In an ideal world, yes. Yet it is still fairly demoralising to realise the FA claims to support whistleblowers until, that is, someone actually takes up the option to report alleged racism – at which point the man at the top of the organisation describes it as hearsay and the relevant checks are ignored.

Play Video 1:19 FA chief executive explains Mark Sampson sacking – video

Spence was 22 when she was called up to the China Cup. It was her first England camp and the start, she hoped, of a long international career. In those circumstances, she chose not to make a complaint because, as she saw it, it would probably be her last involvement and she was afraid of the repercussions (very wise, you might think, given what has happened to Aluko). Is that really so hard to understand? Glenn has invited derision in the past by admitting he was “not a football expert” but, in this instance, he doesn’t have to be. It is more a case of understanding humans.

Glenn now says he will offer a personal apology to Aluko and Spence if the latest investigation – the third time the case has been opened – rules that it was actually Sampson who was not telling the truth, rather than sticking to the apparent belief that two England players must have conjured the stories out of thin air.

It wasn’t the kind of promise a man in his position would ordinarily make if it was in his mind to resign and, though there is still a long way for this story to run, nobody should be too surprised if he and his colleagues try to see it out. But can you trust them again? In many ways it is all part of an enduring story. But it is still fairly dispiriting, once again, to realise that the Football Association is an age away from being the organisation we want it to be.