Last Monday, Alessandro Del Piero was in London for Walt Disney productions. Next day, Gabriel Batistuta was in attendance for a TV shoot at an abattoir outside Florence. Then on Wednesday, Oliver Bierhoff was at work in Milan promoting the tourist season in Lignano Sabbiadoro, an Adriatic seaside resort.

What are we talking about? Sponsors, that is the name of the game. Walt Disney films for children, abattoir TV shoots and tourist promotional activities are all part of the working routine for today's soccer mega-star.

There was a time when soccer players had to worry about training, eating and sleeping, in that order. Nowadays, a star player such as Juventus striker Del Piero, Argentina and Fiorentina captain Batistuta and Udinese's German centre-forward Bierhoff spends nearly as much time in contact with his agent as with his team coach.

Those who saw the great Stanley Matthews in action often refer to the attention and detail the England player lavished on his football boots. Matthews looked after them himself and was regularly to be seen putting dobbin and/or polish on them in the dressing room prior to a big game.

These days, the international mega-star has his own line of boots, courtesy of his sponsor - it hardly needs underlining that, while different players lend their name to different commercial ventures such as Bierhoff's tourist promotions, nearly all big-name players have a personal contract with one of the big sports wear companies - Nike, Adidas, Puma, Diadora, Asics, Reebok, Champion, Lotto, Ellesse etc.

The nature of that contract, too, has long since changed.

There was a time when the sportswear sponsor would provide a pair of boots and be happy at that. That is simply no longer the case. The sponsors now want much more than a photo-ad of the player on the back page of Sunday's newspaper, saying "Willie Blogs Wears Bonzo YR Boots, So Why Not You?".

Massimo Giunti, spokesperson for Nike Italia, explains the brave new world of footballer sponsorship as seen by the sponsors: "Nike, for example, are relative newcomers to soccer . . . but from the moment we got in, we opted for players whose whole personality and public image we can go with, not only players who win but players whose on-and-off-the-field behaviour is always above suspicion . . . in short, good role models for soccer fans all round the world and the best example that I can think of, in Italy at least, is Paolo Maldini (Italy and AC Milan)."

The sponsor nowadays wants a distinct flexibility and visibility about his brandname's link to any particular superstar. The sponsors' demands, of course, can sometimes conflict not only with a player's training requirements but also with his own nature. Not everyone is comfortable in front of the camera.

Then, too, there are other problems. Last Monday in London, Del Piero was filming his Walt Disney feature for children late into the evening and accordingly had to postpone another scheduled TV piece until the next morning.

When the TV crew arrived around at his London hotel for their Tuesday morning interview, Del Piero was still in bed after a night out at a restaurant with his old pal Gianluca Vialli, one-time Juventus team-mate and now better known as Chelsea player-manager. Soccer players, by the way, have an amazing capacity for sleep.

In the end, Del Piero's agent apologised and called off the TV interview. In the meantime, a sleepy Del Piero arrived down in the hotel lobby and did an interview for a local newspaper. So what was going on? Perhaps, it was simply that Del Piero was not looking his best and his agent did not want him to spoil his image by giving a tussled-hair, unkempt-look, early morning TV interview.

Or take Batistuta's abattoir shoot. One colleague from Reuters bravely made his way to the appointed venue, about an hour outside Florence last week only to find himself wondering if he had got the day or the address wrong. He hadn't. The proposed advertising shoot with Batistuta had been abandoned.

The problem here was a conflict of sponsors' interests. One sponsor had come up with an idea linking Argentina's most famous current player with one of the products for which his country is justly famous - beef. What that sponsor did not realise, however, was that Batistuta is not only a substantial beef-farmer himself in Argentina but that he also has a exclusive contract to promote Argentine beef which conflicted with even indirect promotion of Italian beef.

In Oliver Bierhoff's case, his promotional activities last week clashed with a friendly training game played on Wednesday by Udinese. In the end, the German got around the problem by making himself available for a collective telephone interview by the assembled hacks who, rather than ask much about the delights of Lignano Sabbiadoro, seemed more concerned about rumours linking Bierhoff's future with AC Milan (Nothing definite yet, says Bierhoff, but Milan are in "pole position" for his services next season).

Which brings us back to where we started. You can ask the guys to talk about bubble-gum, boots, cars, coats, holiday homes or whatever, but in the end people want to talk to soccer players about soccer. The real business is soccer. And soccer, these days, is big business.