I reckon that if you took all the phones of everybody involved in football, 90% of them would contain emails or text messages displaying homophobia, sexism, racism and everything in between.

Not that I’m defending the former Cardiff manager Malky Mackay and the club’s former head of recruitment, Iain Moody, after the dawn raid on Moody’s south London home, at which investigators allegedly recovered text messages containing similarly distasteful exchanges between the pair. It’s just a gut feeling that I have, coupled with my experience of people within the game shoving similar filth under my nose for the past dozen years or so.

If you want the truth, I’m desensitised to a lot of this stuff, which is a worry, but I remain fully aware of what constitutes a racist, homophobic or sexist message, even if often it appears my contemporaries do not.

But the reported messages are full-on. One reads: “Fkn chinkys. Fk it. There’s enough dogs in Cardiff for us all to go around”, and was supposedly sent after the arrival of South Korean international Kim Bo-Kyung. Among footballers, that would probably get a couple of laughs and a few winces on the coach to a game. Another message, relating to a player’s female agent, reads: “I hope she’s looking after your needs, I bet you’d love a bounce on her falsies.” I can guarantee you that message would have received a generous round of laughter.

Before I wander down the road to hypocrisy, let me say that I have taken measures to distance myself from this behaviour. Not because I am on some crusade towards the moral high ground, but because I’m terrified of either losing my phone or having it stolen. I have a friend who was put on the front page of the News of the World after losing his phone on a night out. The person who found it didn’t hand it in to the police, he went through it and then sold some pictures to that newspaper.

I don’t have any incriminating pictures of myself on my phone – at least, not any more – but in the past I have been bombarded with both vulgar pictures and messages from others. In this world of hanging people in the public eye out to dry, whether they’ve done anything wrong or not, I don’t want to run the risk of compromising myself for something as ridiculous as association with known felons. And before you ask, I fully expect that last sentence to bite me on the arse one day. But calling up those people and telling them to leave me out of the round robin texts that I know are being sent to most of their phonebook was easier than I thought. And it made me think that most of the crap they are sending out is sent because they think it’s what others want to see, rather than because of any genuine animosity towards the person it relates to.

It isn’t just the messages that Mackay and Moody have to contend with. The pair are at the centre of allegations by Cardiff owner Vincent Tan that the club paid way over market value for eight players during their single ill-fated season in the Premier League. It has been claimed that one £600,000 transfer had an additional payment of £600,000 to an agent. I don’t need to tell you that commissions of 100% are something of a rarity in football.

But it appears that Tan may have known about these messages and used them to solicit an apology from Mackay after the Scot dropped a claim against the club for unfair dismissal. Time and again, Tan attempted to oust the pair who, as he saw it, were costing him millions of pounds unnecessarily. In October 2013, Tan replaced Moody with a 23-year-old Kazakh called Alisher Apsalyamov and in December, possibly after uncovering the evidence he needed, Tan emailed Mackay telling him to either resign or be sacked. A week later, Mackay left the club.

What this unsavoury incident may yet show is that Tan may have had a number of grounds upon which he based his controversial handling of Mackay’s exit from the club. Perhaps he could be forgiven for standing in his executive box at the next home game with the faint appearance of a man wearing a slightly smug “I told you so” grin on his face. He might even be due a few apologies, particularly from those fans who demonstrated outside the Cardiff City stadium last season at Tan’s perceived handling of the club. But football doesn’t work like that.

Whatever happens now, Mackay will struggle to get back into football any time soon; the claims against him and Moody have already cost him a shot at the Crystal Palace job, for which Mackay was the favourite.

But one day Mackay will get back in. The pages of today’s story will have long ago been used as chip paper and somebody, somewhere will afford him the opportunity to start again. Like so often in football, progress happens one funeral at a time.

Tales from the Secret Footballer is out this week in paperback and ebook. To buy your copy for £5.99 (RRP £7.99) visit guardianbookshop.co.uk or call 0330 333 6846