The Mark Sampson episode has let down women's football and threatens to trivialise the careers of many fine athletes

The women’s game has long been told that it does not attract the crowds or the broadcast deals and should therefore be content with the little it has. Of course that overlooks the Football Association’s throttling of the nascent women’s game in the 1920s when women were banned from using FA pitches for the small matter of 50 years. It came just at the advent of leisure time for the working-classes, when modern popular culture was taking shape and watching live sport got a foothold on the national consciousness.

By and large there is no complaining from today’s top women players about the historical head-start given to the men’s game, despite the disparity in wages and opportunity. A top women’s England international at City might hope to earn up £70,000 a year and, with a £26,000 FA central contract on top plus endorsements, she might be up to six figures. Carli Lloyd, the United States international and 2016 Fifa player of the year, earned £30,000 a game for the six she played on loan at City last season.

The vast majority are just hoping for enough that they can commit their lives full-time to the training and conditioning that all the men in the top divisions and many outside of that, can take for granted. That was the idea behind the central contracts to give England internationals a taste of the professional lifestyle, albeit on the kind of numbers the men were earning in the 1970s.

Yet for all the profile raising of the women’s game by the FA, the WSL started on Friday with many fearing that the Mark Sampson episode had set it back. England’s most successful manager turned out to be a man who did not know what an appropriate relationship was between a coach and his players. A man trusted with the biggest job in the sport might have been labouring under the kind of misconception once offered as an explanation for the behaviour of Sven-Goran Eriksson. That foremost he saw working in football as a really good way of meeting women.

Sampson’s misconduct, and the FA’s failure to act when it became clear that an England manager required by safeguarding experts to do a development and mentoring programme might not be a very suitable England manager, has let down the women’s game and the women in it. It threatens to trivialise the careers and aspirations of many fine athletes who love the game so much they are prepared to play it for annual wages that their male counterparts earn over the course of a morning’s stretching.

One has to ask whether a senior woman at the FA might have been able to spot the problems with Sampson, or at least flag up a concern. The human resources director at the FA during the time of Sampson’s safeguarding investigation was a woman, and certainly that past regime was placed squarely in the firing line during Wednesday’s FA briefing on the sacking, but there is still precious little diversity in the higher echelons.

The FA did have Heather Rabbatts as an independent board member until June and she was spot-on calling out the organisation’s risible disciplinary case against Chelsea over Eva Carneiro - around the time in late 2015 that Martin Glenn, the FA chief executive, was first told about the Sampson investigation. The obvious conclusion is, if Glenn did not think it appropriate to ask to see the findings of a safeguarding investigation into one of his most high-profile staff then the FA needs someone senior who would.

The Sampson affair already feels like it has detached itself from the women’s game and is drifting away from any notion of care or concern for those who play it. Rather it has turned into a classic episode of FA murder mystery, the old parlour game of who gets stabbed in the back and who survives the week with his career intact.

The other collateral are the male coaches who work in the women’s game, with seven of the ten top-flight WSL 1 clubs managed by men. As another of their number Keith Boanas, of Watford, in WSL 2, suggested this week, post-Sampson they will fear being tarred with the same brush. That men working in the women’s game will now also be under suspicion is unfair too. But, as the women who play for them know only too well: in women’s football, you do not often get what you deserve.

Tevez in need of diplomacy

After nine months at Shanghai Shenhua, with mixed results for him and the team, including a very early Asian Champions League exit, Carlos Tevez has declared that Chinese players lack the “technical skills” to play the game and “will do for the next 50 years”. It is quite a declaration from the Argentinian in a country which, even he might be aware, has a degree of sensitivity to foreign nationals doing the place down.

Same as it ever was as far as Tevez is concerned, a man for whom diplomacy has never come naturally. He was responding to his manager Wu Jingui’s suggestion that Tevez might be a touch too heavy to play at his optimum level. Tevez earns, so we are told, more than any footballer in the world, around £32 million a year and the Chinese are left to wonder what he might have said about them had they dared pay him less than a rate that works out at £1 a second.