JURGEN Klinsmann, so it is said, is looking for around £50,000 a week, plus a company helicopter, to return to play in Britain next season. David Ginola is not sure whether the £20,000 a week he pockets is worth staying around for on Tyneside much longer. Savo Milosevic believes he might be better rewarded for falling over his own feet away from Villa Park.
Everywhere you look footballers are seeking to plunge their noses so deep into the trough they will soon need to borrow breathing equipment from the heads of privatised utilities. In the Premiership next season there will hardly be a club without half a dozen millionaires on its books.
The intriguing question is what do they spend their money on? Klinsmann, after all, famously drives the oldest VW in Christiandom in Leeds, according to George Graham, Tony Yeboah doesn't like to pay for his wife's medical treatment, believing the club ought to do that sort of thing for him; in Middlesbrough certain players even direct irate milkmen to the Riverside rather than settle modest home delivery bills themselves.
Whatever it is they are spending it on, it isn't charity unlike possession, when it comes to money, our footballers are loth to give it away. According to the Directory of Social Change, the research body behind the book, The Millionaire Givers: Wealth & Philanthropy in Britain, footballers are among the most parsimonious of the new rich.
"We've researched all the charitable trusts in this country," says the Directory's Dave Casson, "and have uncovered nothing major by any football star."
The fact is, it seems, the average Premiership footballer is about as charitable as Italy's defence.
Naturally there are exceptions to the mean: the Bryan Gunn Leukemia Fund and the Bryan Robson Scanner Appeal were both kick-started with substantial donations from the players themselves. Gazza recently handed over a handsome cheque to a home for battered wives (somewhere nice for Sheryl, it has been suggested). And Gary Mabbutt is always generous with his presence, undertaking a deal of voluntary work, with diabetic children. But such examples are rare.
The reaction to Robbie Fowler's T-shirt message of solidarity with sacked Liverpool dockers last week shows what a difference a touch of humanity can make. Fowler's new public image of responsible young man was endorsed no end by his performance on Monday night.
After tumbling over David Seaman, he showed Corinthian levels of sportsmanship, pleading with the referee not to award a penalty and then patting the spot kick lamely at the keeper. If nothing else, a bit of carefully publicised personal sacrifice - endowing a school like Lennox Lewis, or trudging the country in the manner of Ian Botham - would do wonders to rescue the image of a profession widely reckoned to be mired in the cult of self.
Then again, since most footballers are advised in financial matters by Eric Hall and his ilk, you can't see much hope of that an agent, after all, can't take ten per cent of what is given away.
