Image is everything. Or, at least, it is if you are trying to sell something. Away from the marketplace, image doesn’t matter at all. The image of an athlete doesn’t matter to anyone who is not trying to make money out of the athlete in question. What actually matters — for an athlete, for anyone — is not image but soul.

But I have been reading about nothing but image for a week and I am fed up with it. I am not interested in Andre Agassi’s marketability or, for that matter, Marlon King’s. What matters is their souls.

It was, of course, Agassi who used his image — long-haired pseudo rebel in hot-lava shorts — to sell cameras. Agassi enhanced the image of a brand of cameras — I forget which — with the slogan “image is everything”. Naturally, this was a useful slogan for pillorying the underachieving little show-off. But then Agassi subverted his own image by shaving his head and bringing his total of grand-slam titles to eight.

Now, after the dramatic revelations in his volume of confessions, people have been asking questions about the damage the stories of drug-taking have done for his “image”, and what would have happened to the Agassi brand if his drug-taking had been made public and his lies had not been believed.

At the same time, King was jailed for a pretty nasty crime and has been hammered for damaging the “image of football”. It was regarded as controversial when Arsène Wenger suggested that it was perfectly legitimate for a man to seek rehabilitation for himself after punishment. King’s real crime — far more serious than that of sexual and common assault — has been this damage to football’s “image”. He has compromised the sport’s money-making possibilities and that is unforgivable.

It is not the individual cases that concern me here. Agassi seems — to judge from the account of the meeting between his father and the father of his wife, Steffi Graf — to have done a highly unusual thing and produced a sporting autobiography worth reading. King’s vile behaviour may or may not be connected with an attitude to the world that comes with youth and vast sums of money.

I am troubled by this business of image. When we discuss wrongdoing in terms of image, we are not making a moral judgment, we are making a financial judgment. But the distinction between these two kinds of judgment has got dangerously blurred — and this is a besetting problem in sport.

Top athletes — unlike pop stars — are marketed on certain conventions about acceptable behaviour. It’s vital to stay legal: drinkers such as George Best and Paul Gascoigne get pity, but if you admit to taking illegal drugs, you are in deep trouble.

Casual use of drugs is much worse — in terms of image — than a lifelong addiction to alcohol.

As a result, sport has built up a new moral code, one in which the seriousness of a crime is measured by the amount that it affects image. That is to say, marketability; that is to say, money. Acts that merely damage the soul get a comparatively easy ride. In sport, we increasingly permit the moral code to be set by the values of marketing. The more we do this, the more we damage our own souls.

• Football writing — in any literate sense of the term — was invented by Brian Glanville and I, like everyone else in the profession, will be for ever in his debt. Glanville collapsed from a suspected heart attack after the Chelsea-Atlético Madrid match 12 days ago and is in hospital recovering. He takes some solace in the fact that he has five books coming out, which is a pretty good score, even for him. These include, along with three reissues of past triumphs, a 2010 edition of his definitive The Story of the World Cup. He also fed me a few teasing appetisers for The Real Arsenal, a non-sanitised history of the club.

Rights and wrongs aren't easily identified

I hope I will not get the animal rights protesters around my front door if I — Agassi-like — make a confession here. But it’s true: I have ridden horses frightfully fast over a series of utterly terrifying obstacles. Terrifying to me, anyway.

On Saturday, at Wetherby races, a horse died. Fell Pack fell at the last flight of hurdles in the 1.10 and was put down as a result of his injuries. This follows a dreadful day at the same track, two weeks back, when four horses were killed.

Animal rights protesters naturally wanted to make plain their own disapproval.

Racing will go into a huddle about this. The sport is very keen on welfare issues — you can make up your own mind as to whether this is a matter of image and marketing, or of soul and morality. Either way, it’s good news for the horses. The fact is that racing is obliged to care, and to care publicly.

My view is that racehorses don’t live a bad life: plenty of food and care and enough excitement to give their lives savour. Most of us would agree that racing tries to meet its moral obligation and doesn’t risk the lives of horses wantonly. Me, I used to compete in eventing, cross country and showjumping; my best horse is now retired and munching hay as I write these words.

I am in favour of animal rights myself, but I don’t think many active racehorses have their rights violated. Certainly, they lead lives that factory-farmed animals could never dream of. If you ever find yourself at the races and you want to protest about animals that have their rights abused, then I suggest you chain yourself to the hamburger van or the fried-chicken concession.

Yas Marina's cost is hard to assess

I wonder how we will look at the new Yas Marina motor-racing circuit in years to come. This is the place where the first Abu Dhabi Grand Prix was held yesterday. It was set up at quite extraordinary cost — some say $1 billion (about £608 million) for the circuit alone and there are estimates of £23 billion for the complex, which also includes a five-star hotel and golf course.

Will we look at the place — once a chunk of desert — as a great milestone on the road to still greater achievements of the human race? Or will we see it as the last great folly of humankind, the last cathedral built to the god of oil?

The rest of the world is considering, reluctantly, such matters as climate change, the effects of fossil fuels, the onrushing time of their disappearance and the ecological holocaust, but Formula One and Abu Dhabi have rushed pell-mell into a celebration of everything that got us into this position in the first place. Perhaps we will come to look at this complex as the place where the wave of folly broke and rolled back.