FURTHER evidence that football has become a Mad, Mad World has surely been provided by events over the past few days.

It seems churlish in the extreme to discuss a topic which I consider to be a very minor one in the great scheme of things -- such as the impending war with Iraq, the ever-present terrorist threat and the murder in Manchester of an unarmed policeman. But as there are huge swathes of the population, mostly male it has to be conceded, who eat, drink, sleep and talk about little else but football, I intend to put in my twopen'orth.

Former Reebok favourite Eidur Gudjohnsen, the Icelandic international, made the tabloids at the weekend by admitting that he had lost £400,000 in casinos. Take another look at that sum. It's the sort of money Lottery and football pools 'investors' dream about, yet Eidur blew it at blackjack and roulette.

I'm not going to start preaching here about the evils of gambling. I can be found in a betting shop most days, having my usual flutter on the horses.

Gudjohnsen will no doubt be feeling wretched enough without me telling him he's been a fool. After all, it's 20 weeks wages he's done in. You don't have to be a mathematical genius to work out that at 20 grand a week, which is what Eidur is paid by Chelsea, it will take several months to repay the casino or fill the hole left in his bank account. No permanent damage there then, provided he can keep drawing that sort of pay; just a stupid and very expensive mistake.

However, Gudjohnsen isn't the first and won't be the last of the legions of young men earning vast sums of money from football to be sucked into the vortex of gambling, drugs, booze, sex; the stuff of which tacky television dramas are made. Perhaps, like Camelot and the football pools companies, Premiership clubs should employ financial experts to advise players on how best to safeguard their considerable income.

Robbie Fowler, whose infamous coke-sniffing panto act got him into trouble with football's authorities, is paid £50,000 a week at Leeds and was considering taking a wages cut to join Man City. In the end he didn't, but I'll hazard a guess that if he had have done, his weekly pay packet would still have been bigger than that earned in a full year by many reading this column.

David Beckham earns £100,000 a week at Man U, who paid £30million for Rio Ferdinand. Beckham could afford to totally outdistance Gudjohnsen at the gaming tables and put a ton of white powder up his nose but does neither and lives as blameless an existence as possible, given his stratospheric profile.

Chelsea are in hock to the banks to the tune of £90 million yet have an annual wages bill which would wipe out a sizeable chunk of Third World debts. Numerous other clubs, Bolton among them, are haunted by cash problems, yet the insanity of huge transfer fees and massive wages continues. Does anyone know why?