The FA chief executive, Martin Glenn, has acted decisively – if confusingly and belatedly – in dismissing Mark Sampson from his post as the manager of the England women’s team.

Glenn’s next step should be to offer his own resignation. Again this should be done promptly, and with an acceptance the public expects more from the governing body of its national sport than bungled attempts at spin and reputation management, or moral principles that appear to bend with the weather vane of bad publicity.

There is at least a note of gender equality here. The male monopoly on FA executive bodge has been decisively shattered. In a moment of glorious egalitarianism the women’s game has claimed its first scandal-ridden managerial sacking and now has a shot at the top job, too. Welcome to the new world. Take a seat. And sorry about the smell.

It is important to keep a clear head on the two distinct waves of Sampson-related turbulence buffeting the FA. First up is the Eni Aluko matter, a muddle of allegations and denial that has branched out from the original complaint of racially loaded language into the wider issue of the FA’s botched attempts to manage the situation.

Second we now have Sampson’s dismissal, apparently as a result of allegations contained within an FA human resources dossier. In a startling coincidence these allegations have only this moment become apparent to Glenn, the organisation’s chief executive, who finds himself shocked to discover such details outlined in a formal report on his own organisation’s headed notepaper.

The FA is adamant Sampson has been sacked because of point two; and that point two is entirely unrelated to point one. One is a safeguarding issue wrapped up in an internal FA review. The other is a race issue wrapped up in an internal FA review. So. Completely different then.

In the real world it is blindingly obvious the two are intimately related. In claiming otherwise the FA’s chief executive is not only taking the public for fools but treating important and heartfelt points of principle with crisis-management contempt.

The events that have led us here are at least becoming clearer. The details will grow more lurid over the next few days as the background to Sampson’s original safeguarding investigation – aspects of which appear to have been an open secret within the women’s game – is subjected to an old-fashioned muck-raking.

Still, though, Sampson’s allies will point out his sacking makes little sense now. An FA investigation of these issues has already deemed him a suitable person to work as the manager of the England women’s team. The allegations were first trailed in 2013 at the time of Sampson’s hiring. The details that so appalled the previously unappalled Glenn were part of a formal complaint in 2014 and subject of a year-long inquiry.

At the end of which Glenn’s own position on this is simply unconvincing. He admits he was made aware of the existence of Sampson’s FA safeguarding report in October 2015, five months after he took up his post. He chose not to read its details, citing in his defence notions of employee confidentiality. Needless to say this confidentiality was instantly waived this week as the tide of publicity turned against Sampson and finding a reason to sack him became a more expedient course.

There are obvious holes in this version of events. The FA’s fundamental role is the administration of a sport where issues of safeguarding are paramount. Why on earth would its chief executive chose not to read a report flagging concerns about behaviour of the manager of the England women’s team around women?

Would Glenn have also thought it inappropriate to read up on the details if a similar investigation had been conducted into, say, Roy Hodgson or Ray Lewington? If so he would have fallen equally short in his duty of care.

In reality it is almost inconceivable senior FA figures would not have already known something of the detail of the Sampson dossier. If not Glenn himself, surely one of his senior lieutenants – Dan Ashworth, for example, is a friend of Sampson – should have made it their business to know.

But then it seems fairly clear what has really changed. The parliamentary investigation into the Aluko matter is unlikely to be as sympathetic as the FA’s own lawyer-led “independent inquiry”. Heavy weather is brewing. The sums have changed. The bad PR of keeping Sampson now outweighs the bad PR of losing him. Time, then, to shift positions, to adopt a frown of pious integrity and speak of the FA’s terrible shock at the details contained in its own inquiry that no one of any importance could have known about before now.

At the end of which you could make a case the FA’s CEO should resign on the Lady Bracknell principle of administrative bungling. One shambolically mishandled FA managerial dismissal is unfortunate. Two in the space of a year, taking in the panicky departure of Sam Allardyce last September, starts to look like top-down incompetence.

Yet this is something more. A failure to oversee and protect the women’s game right up to the highest representative level is a betrayal not only of the players under the care of the England manager but those at every level below.

The FA’s original 1903 articles of incorporation state its objective is to promote the game and to “protect it from abuses”. This is a pastoral organisation, there to promote the national sport and to nourish – no laughter at the back – the national wellbeing, to encourage participation and enjoyment and good practice. The inability to do so here, the failure to set the highest levels of integrity and scrutiny in dealing with issues around women’s sport should be a source of shame to all involved.

What next then? Glenn may well end up falling on his sword but the FA’s problems are less easily untangled, just as the sheer volume of otherwise high-achieving executives to have left their posts in muddled circumstances is startling in itself.

English football’s governing body has enjoyed a painful, confused transition from stodgy, blazered conservatism to a gimmicky plc-style vehicle run like a cross between an advertising agency and a cash-drenched travelling theme park. Throughout which the confusion of basic roles and intentions continues, with the sense of the FA as just another commercial organisation blinded by the thrill of the spectacle, drunk on the possibilities of football’s wild frontier, a place where behind the gloss and the fizz pretty much anything goes.

The Sampson affair is a case in point. The FA has given the impression it sees this as a PR game to be won, a business of reputation management rather than hard points of principle and the obligation to set a cloudless example. At the centre of which one thing seems clear. If Sampson’s behaviour really does merit his dismissal it seems inconceivable a chief executive who chose not to review his own safeguarding report should be allowed to remain in charge.