It would have been pretty unrealistic, when Ally McCoist was offered circa £750,000 as a salary by Rangers a few years back, for him to turn round and say: "No, no, don't be ridiculous. Think of the club. Please make my pay £300,000 instead."
The situation McCoist now finds himself in is embarrassing, and carries not a lot of public sympathy, but it is not entirely of his own making.
Save for maybe Albert Schweitzer, I've yet to hear of a human being begging their employer not to remunerate them so generously. It just doesn't happen. We all love the lucre.
Like so much of this Rangers calamity - the current McCoist compensation row or the Mike Ashley/SFA saga - the causes go back to Charles Green and his reckless policies. Green chucked about Rangers' millions without a care in the world, and McCoist was one of the beneficiaries.
McCoist has been earning atrocious, absurd amounts from Rangers and I daresay he's been enjoying it. But now, in playing a compensation game with the club, having tendered his resignation, it doesn't appear so comfortable for him.
To all reasonable observers, McCoist would have a far greater claim were it the club, and not him, who was seeking to terminate the contract. Especially given his relative failings in his job.
Rangers are strapped for cash. The Ibrox coffers are drained, partly through gross mismanagement, partly through fans' boycotts and other circumstances. The club simply cannot afford to throw a fat cheque in Ally's direction, never mind whether he actually deserves one.
Among those he cares about, the public perception of McCoist is now a dangerous area. He is not viewed as a man needing money. He reportedly has wealth. He has always said "the club must come first".
Side by side with all this, if McCoist is viewed as being grasping or greedy, it will harm his reputation at Rangers. For his sake - and for the club's - I hope McCoist and Rangers can agree a relatively modest compensation deal, whereby both parties are "preserved" in some way.
The bigger Rangers story - well above that of McCoist - remains the intractable ownership issue. Power and governance at Ibrox are hamstrung by the various shareholder factions, many at war with eachother, with the club left in limbo as a consequence.
Investment companies, hedge funds and speculators appear to own Rangers - not people. When the IPO was taken up to the tune of £22m back in January 2013 many Rangers fans lauded the outcome. Quite a few have now changed their mind.
I say this delicately but, when you look at Rangers today, there is almost a case for a benign dictator figure of the old days - a Jack Walker, a Jack Hayward - who is a club owner, carer, benefactor et al. Few football stories are as grisly as this market-owned Rangers saga.
And now, in the midst of this chaos, Rangers are in further trouble over Mike Ashley's dual ownership of the Ibrox club and Newcastle United.
The SFA, to be frank, faced no option but to bring Ashley to account over this. I'm sure some lawyer will say otherwise - they always can - but on the surface Ashley's Rangers involvement looks a clear breach of Rule 19 and its outlawing of two-club ownership and influence.
It is now in vogue to aver that the SFA won't be able to touch Ashley, that he'll be legally one step ahead of the blazers, and that, basically, he is untouchable. Well, we'll see about that soon enough.
Given these Ashley troubles, some Rangers fans still pine for Dave King, whose 41 felonies and subsequent criminal conviction in a South African high court are strangely viewed as not perturbing in the slightest. It is getting increasingly hard to follow the rhyme and reasoning of those who "just want the best for Rangers".
Ally McCoist, presumably, will be gone soon enough. He has to be. The fascination will be in seeing if, under a new manager, Rangers' on-field play improves, and if the deserting fans in turn respond to this.
It was long ago forgotten that Rangers are a football club. It became a caricature, a political circus. Getting back to football may be no bad thing for the club.
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