AMONG NORMAL people, a rough scale of human values applies. Journalists are not highly regarded, rightly enough. Politicians will never be loved; lawyers don't poll well; and the advertising industry should probably just forget it, breathing included.

But what's worse? What's lower than any crawling thing? What do you find when you pick up a tabloid editor or a football agent to see what might be underneath?

I think I speak for the very concepts of democracy, fairness and decency when I mention the people who run football clubs. Just when you think there couldn't be a skeleton capable of stooping lower, someone mentions the fate of Martin Jol.

I harbour no particular grudge towards Tottenham Hotspur. West Ham, if it matters, were always my sentimental weakness. But whatever Spurs are blowing currently, it's not bubbles. Credibility, possibly.

Jol, pictured above, on the other hand, has always managed to squeeze in a bit of sense while trying to discuss This Great Game of Ours. A while back he attempted to say, in passing, that his record as a Spurs coach stood comparison with anyone's in, give or take, half a century. It was a boast, clearly, but it was also a fact.

For thanks, he is treated like a bit-player victim in a third-rate mafia movie, denied even the courtesy of a dagger in the chest. He got it in the back, instead.

But why? Why not, as our sports editor and everyone else with an interest in football asks, just sack the guy? Honestly, straightforwardly: here's your cards and your very handsome compensation deal. Thank you and goodbye.

Instead, Jol has to spend months conniving with the fiction that his job (unlike his defence) is safe. Clearly, Juande Ramos is a fascinating individual. Couple him with Gus Poyet and you might even, very possibly, wind up with the cliché bad hacks and football chairmen term "a dream ticket". But better than Jol, the lugubrious one? I tend to doubt it.

Even that part, the practical part, is somehow irrelevant. Relevant to football and its diminishing soul is Daniel Levy, Spurs chairman, bidding a "warm farewell" to "Martin". I quote the BBC. "For me, his departure is regrettable," said Mr Levy. Badly-drawn cartoon crocodiles do tear-stricken with more aplomb.

So what? A very good question. Martin Jol will have found a better club in a slightly smaller country before the ink on these words is dry: no harm done. Spurs, meanwhile, will go on trying and failing to reassume their historic place within the European elite. In some parts of London, people will care. So what?

Issues of style and attitude remain, nevertheless. Why must football be quite so tawdry? Just because the stakes are very high these days? The stakes were always high; chairmen were always idiots; coaches were always disposable. Something more toxic is eating at "This Great" and so forth.

Is it now impossible to proclaim that Mr Jol has been treated despicably? Agents, "friends", "representatives" and people lower than journalists intervene in every discourse. We have to be careful, lawyers remind us, about what we say. How come? How, and by what process, is football exempt, suddenly, from any moral rule?

My opinion, still free and legal, is this: the single sport that matters to half the planet lives with the moral sense of a very cheap hustler.

Not Mr Levy, obviously, or the fascinating Juande, or the many lawyers these entirely admirable professional men could bring to bear on my few and poor words. I neither imply not infer. Heaven forbid and forfend. I take it as self-evident, clearly, that Mr Daniel Levy has done no more than execute his duties as a responsible office-bearer within a major sporting franchise.

Got all that? Good.

Still, what a tosser.

Martin Jol is a decent coach who cares greatly, in my view, about the game of football. I also believe he has been ill-used. I further allege that the sport is now so perverted by money, lawyers, agents, boardroom ego and bad journalism we cannot point to the connection between noses, faces, and what's plain to the nearest village idiot. Or the club chairman.

Many years ago I knew some Spurs fans. West Ham were then in their pomp. What impressed me most about Tottenham - much more than Arsenal, or even (the old jokes are the best) Chelsea - was a deep pride. They cared about football more than winning or losing.

In Sevilla, when they are not being robbed of their birthright by English TV money, they feel much the same. Irony, eh? They think, poor fools, that the sport is their possession, an indestructible part of their city, culture and history. They hold these things in common.

Coaches were once the same. Sir Alex Ferguson, love him or hate him, may be the last of the peculiar breed. It is why, in part, Mourinho was always a joke, and why Juande has not entirely understood the problem, and why Martin Jol deserved better.

Everything you do is for the people, meaning the support. I will not trouble the lawyers unduly by suggesting that Daniel Levy, and all those like him, may have overlooked the detail.

How do you acquire a Ferguson, a Stein, a Shankly or a Paisley? By mail order? By corporate diktat?

Martin Jol will move on. He has no choice. He was judged - sometimes the cliches come thick and fast - by results. My impression is, nevertheless, that he cared more about Tottenham Hotspur FC than the people who plotted his removal for months on end, the people who could not simply, honestly say "sacked".

If football is to remain a thing to cherish, a few of those human values need to be reclaimed. Just don't seek aid from a journalist, an agent, a lawyer, or one of the men who own clubs. And if Spurs fans don't rebel soon, they are not the boys I used to know.