IT started with puerile banter between two sets of rival fans on Twitter and looks set to end with Bolton Wanderers’ new signing banned and/or fined for social media posts more than a decade old. Football, it seems, has a moral decision to make.

Firstly - and let us be completely crystal clear here - no defence can be offered for the content of Dion Charles’s tweets, unearthed during a Twitter spat on Tuesday involving several seemingly unconnected supporters of Bolton and Wigan Athletic.

Said content, spread along the course of several messages and a few years, quickly made its way to the Football Association, whose disciplinary committee will now decide whether it warrants the same sort of punishments dished out to West Ham’s Jarrod Bowen, Middlesbrough’s Marco Bola and Peterborough United’s Jonson Clarke-Harris – which extended to a four-match ban and a heavy fine in one case.

Charles issued a swift and unreserved apology, insisting that he had “grown up considerably” since tweeting as a 15, 16 and 17-year-old, hammering home the point: “I am not racist, and I am not homophobic.”

Wanderers too acted quickly to underline their own disappointment, branding the footballer’s discriminatory language as “completely unacceptable.”

But as everyone scrambled for their conciliatory position, onlookers including myself were left pondering the ethical argument. Should such ignorance in your mid-teens be judged in the same way it would in your mid-twenties, or should some sort of statute of limitation be imposed?

What responsibility falls upon the employer, i.e. the club? Wanderers could now be left without their most expensive signing in seven-and-a-half years for a month if the FA choose to impose a ban of similar length to Clarke-Harris, for example.

In other professions, social media activity is closely vetted. Landlords even scour Facebook accounts to scrutinise possible tenants, so why would any club take a risk if this type of thing is to become the norm? Accrington did, and Charles played for 18 successful months at the Wham Stadium without his past coming back to haunt him.

Once more, to emphasise the point, the world may well have been blissfully unaware of all this had a group of bored millennials not picked up their phones on Tuesday afternoon, triggering the chain of sincere apologies. So if Josh from Wigan can uncover such dirt in a few hours on a Samsung, should a professional football club, or the footballing authorities be making more of an effort?

The best possible answer would be for people, young and old, not to utter these dreadful things in the first place. As a father of two boys coming up to Charles’s age when he committed his indiscretions, I would be mortified if they said such a thing.

But I am also not so green to know that teenagers can sometimes say stupid things which will embarrass them in later life, and that they often lack the life experience to believe in what they are saying in the first place. That filter, one hopes, improves with age.

With any luck, the next generation born into a social media world will heed lessons of the past, grasping that what you say online isn’t always consequence free. That applies to society, not just football, which lest we forget is just a tiny slice.

In the meantime, the FA’s disciplinarians – who it is a safe bet comprise of folk who did not grow up in the TikTok and Instagram age – are left with a quandary on what to do when such things emerge.

Judge one, judge them all. And within moments of Charles’s tweets being plastered around social media, there were more examples, other players.

Banning players may act as a deterrent but I do have my doubts. He already has a heavier punishment knowing his online identity will now forever be tagged with this unsavoury incident, whether that be in a Goggle search or a Wikipedia page. Potentially, that is punishment enough.

There is also an argument to suggest education is the answer. The FA does have that option and in fairness to academies up and down the land, they already school their players acceptable online behaviour. Surely with persistence, the message ‘just don’t say these things in the first place’ can sink in?

If football is ever going to be the inclusive game we read about in the statements then it is by working with fans, players and coaches that progress will be made.

Waiting for the past to catch up with footballers so an example can be made of them just seems the wrong thing to do.