You will have seen that Ruud Gullit recently lost his £20,000 per week job as manager of Chelsea. Personally I don't understand why the job of managing a rather civilised London borough should pay so well, but I know little of the problems of local administration and no doubt it is demanding work.

One can only hope the area's attractions, from Sloane Street to the harbour, will not diminish under the new manager, Gianluca Vialli. It is thought that he will bring a stylish Italian touch to the neighbourhood and put a halt to the tawdry commercialisation of the King's Road.

All right - not very funny. And the begrudgers and detractors have already been out in force. Much has been made of Gullit's enormous income - the salary of over £1 million being only the icing on an annual cake made up of cash from his branded boots, his own range of clothing, his Pizza Hut advertising contract and his work as a BBC commentator.

However, as usual it is very hard to get through to the man in the street the reality that a large income is usually accompanied (and thereby diminished) by a lavish lifestyle, unless one is a complete miser, which Ruud isn't.

There are many demands on a man like Ruud, not least the cost of maintaining two ex-wives with two children each, a fifth child by his current girlfriend, and of course the ongoing alimony battle with his second wife Christine. Such things wear a man and his bank balance down.

One can be sure too that Ruud's current squeeze Estelle Cruyff, as niece of wealthy Dutch soccer icon Johann, expects certain monetary standards to be maintained.

Anyway, there are conflicting accounts of why exactly Ruud stormed out of his meeting with Chelsea chairman Ken Bates. And it is rather embarrassing for a sensitive man like Ruud to be accused of greed, of departing the job because insufficient money was being put on the table.

Ruud Gullit simply wanted to make it clear that it is just not possible to run out of things to spend your money on.

It was for this reason that he made his historic decision to resign last Thursday. He was well aware that Friday's papers would be full of the court case involving Prince Jefri, youngest brother of the Sultan of Brunei, the world's richest man.

Prince Jefri (44) and two of his former emissaries, Bob and Rafi Manoukian, are involved in what could become one of the most expensive personal actions in British legal history.

It is a rather seedy story involving high-class prostitutes and heavy gambling, but the astronomical sums of money involved show how poor a man like Ruud Gullit really is.

The London-based Manoukian brothers are reputedly worth £250 million. Prince Jefri is worth rather more, owning as he does some 40 palaces in Brunei, and at one time a fleet of 600 cars. He recently bought Asprey, the queen's jewellers, for £244 million.

But the media focus to date has been on Prince Jefri's expensive taste in objets d'art. These have included a bedside rug of solid gold thread and 25,000 precious stones which cost $8m, a similarly bejewelled gold screen ($12m), a solid gold blackjack table (£895,000), a set of 10 gold and platinum erotic watches depicting couples copulating on the hour (Swiss Fr12m) , and a similar set of 10 pens (£800,000).

Counsel for the Manoukian brothers has described Prince Jefri as a "one-man walking market" for the suppliers of luxury goods, who apparently flocked to Brunei in their efforts to do business with him.

It will be clear from all this that even the best-paid footballers and club managers, such as Ruud Gullit, are only in the ha'penny place when it comes to serious money. That is surely the point Ruud has made in his dramatic departure: it is embarrassing that professional footballers are still too poorly paid to purchase their own gold and platinum erotic watches.

There is a ray of hope in the fact that the new Chelsea manager, Gianluca Vialli, comes from a millionaire background, and unlike Ruud Gullit did not have to pull himself up by his bootstraps. He already appreciates the trappings of wealth.

Slightly worrying, however, from the Chelsea players' viewpoint, must be Vialli's assertion that "The riches I am seeking are not the kind of riches you put in the bank". To most of today's footballers, that kind of remark is downright tasteless.