Sideline Cut: As he casts an eye around the world from which he was yesterday expelled, Chelsea's Adrian Mutu must wonder how his misdemeanour came to merit such radical censure. After all, everything he had learned since he was contracted to play in the strange bubble of Premiership football must have told him that the law did not count.

Although the decision to erase Mutu's name from their books has been dressed by Chelsea as a symbolic and noble example of their zero-tolerance policy against drugs, a matter of morality over money, it sounds hollow. In a club where money simply is not a matter of concern, it is easy to make a grandiose gesture with the career of a player who had largely become excess baggage under the regime of Jose Mourinho.

Until yesterday, Mutu was just another of the blandly handsome and inordinately wealthy young football players who occasionally got singled out on the weekend highlights programmes for some inimitable sleight of touch or a spectacular goal against some of the more modest Premiership clubs.

No angel, he has a reputation for enjoying what is loosely referred to as the "playboy" lifestyle which has ultimately led to his dismissal. Now, he joins Mark Bosnich as a figure of some notoriety, a player whose personal conduct was considered unacceptable by the most fashionable and wealthy representative of the obscenely moneyed high table of football.

Adrian Mutu admitted to taking cocaine in his leisure time after traces of the so-called designer drug were discovered after an in-house drug test at Stamford Bridge. As such, he broke the law and as someone with the potential to influence Chelsea's growing legion of young supporters, he was either ignorant or uncaring of his civic responsibilities.

If the Premiership had its house in order, the notion of a wealthy 25-year-old living in London succumbing to the choice powder of the in-crowd around south Ken and the Sloane Road might be the cause of some genuine concern. But Mutu's crime and punishment has coincided with word that four other Chelsea footballers candidly admitted to squandering up to half a million pounds each in a single bookies shop for fun.

Like the parable of the Premiership studs lighting their cigars with £50 notes, there is something genuinely disturbing and sickening about the fact Mutu's team-mates could throw away a total of £2 million out of what essentially amounts to boredom.

Consider Mutu's background: a child of Ceausescu's Romania, slight and gifted and poor, brought up to Dynamo Bucharest in 1998 and then suddenly propelled into the glittering world of Serie A and the Premiership when Claudio Ranieri acquired him for £15 million.

In the six years since he joined Europe's elite sporting teams, how many hours were spent educating Mutu on his civic duties as a public figure, of how he might invest the vast sums of money that would be registered to his bank account? Or of the things he might achieve with just a small percentage of that money in Romania?

In an environment where every last whim is catered for, where footballers are treated like temperamental and spoilt Hollywood divas, who ever stopped to advice Mutu of the importance of retaining some semblance of personal responsibility?

Mutu empties his locker at Stamford Bridge at a time when the petulance and fallout from last weekend's definitive Arsenal versus Manchester United encounter continues unabated. As well as the graceless exchanges on the field and the whining from the two managers the Premiership cherishes as its most wise and distinguished comes allegations of a food fight in the tunnel afterwards. Soup thrown at Sir Alex! The thought is funny in a depressing sort of way until you hear poor old George Best complaining that back in his day, they would have done the manly thing and just chinned one another. George's protest sounds prehistoric because his day and the values of that time have long since ceased to matter.

And the truth is that those who govern the Premiership today are happy to pay lip service to the moral guidelines enforced by men like Matt Busby and Bill Shankly and Alf Ramsey without entertaining the slightest intention of trying to replicate such ground rules in the contemporary game.

Alex Ferguson, the man who stormed into a house party hosted by Ryan Giggs and Lee Sharpe all those years ago, probably carried some of that old-fashioned sensibility with him. But the years have made him more cynical and tired and it is doubtful he has the energy - or authority - to maintain a similarly vigilant eye over the nocturnal impulses of England's last white hope, Wayne Rooney.

Ferguson's edge has been blunted by a bloated and soulless league which has bludgeoned its way into every home through Sky television. And so the tawdry exposures of the off-field behaviour of men like Stan Collymore, Lee Bowyer and Kieron Dyer drift in and out of our lives. Spoiled, flash, characters who in Kitchener's day would have been canon-fodder.

When the allegations of Mutu's abuse of cocaine first came to light, it was hard not to think of the infamous sight of Robbie Fowler literally sniffing the white baseline in his last days with Liverpool. It was a foolish if witty retort to the reports and taunts that he was a coke-head.

More than most footballers, Fowler stands at the turning point of English football. There was that gesture, arrogant and aloof and just reeking of his own sense of infallibility. But this was also the same player that took off his shirt to reveal a slogan in support of the Liverpool dockers. It was a stagey sort of show of support - a born striker's flourish - but it carried with it genuine echoes of a social conscience, an awareness that as a footballer, he had roots and that he retained some sense of loyalty to them. His confidence destroyed before he was finally discarded by Liverpool, Fowler has somehow got gobbled up by the Premiership, his light all but expired, his England days over before they ever began.

Back in the 1980s, when England was smashed broke and the terraces were teeming with disenfranchised young men, it was said that the old glory game was filled with so much hate it would eat itself. That did not happen and there was a period, in the early years of the Premiership when the wire cages were torn down and families ventured tentatively back to their local football grounds, that a new age of enlightenment appeared to have blessed the game. Now, it is not hate that threatens English soccer but gluttony and pride and sloth.

Had Chelsea really cared about Adrian Mutu's indiscretion, they could have demonstrated as much by getting their player to take part in community-related drugs prevention groups. They could have fined him a season's wages and asked him to publicly admit he was wrong. They could have tried to educate their player and in doing so set an example that might make some positive difference to the Premiership culture.

Instead, they cut him adrift for a minor sin while all around the country the young men with whom he shared the hallowed turf continue to abuse their wealth and privilege simply because they know no different.