Crisis on Wall Street? You can bet they are feeling the effects in dressing-rooms from White Hart Lane to Carrow Road and beyond. I know that many players have been phoning their agents or financial advisers looking for safe havens for their money.

The Government guarantees the first £50,000 in a savings account - not much use to your average Barclays Premier League player. You can imagine the panic: “Fifty thousand pounds? That's only a week's wages.”

Players are talking about whether to move money into different accounts, or to countries where their savings are 100 per cent guaranteed. I am not suggesting that rich footballers deserve sympathy, but it does not matter how much you earn, if your investments plummet in value it will hurt you and worry you. While supporters would not care if a star has had a million or two wiped off his bottom line, they will if the player is doing badly on the pitch because he is distracted.

Massive earnings can make for massive losses. Many footballers are gamblers by nature and will invest heavily in risky schemes - and if you are earning £50,000 a week, you are more likely to invest £500,000 than £5,000. Top players, like other multimillionaires, have investment portfolios. It is not uncommon for a player to own half a dozen houses, some abroad, taking on a lot of debt. If a big star at a club has invested in a project, his team-mates often follow suit.

Some are hands-on and interested in finance, others leave it to their advisers. Many footballers are lazy and blasé and like everything to be done for them: “Can I just write a cheque and you do the rest?”

When I was at Chelsea, Ken Bates, the former chairman, asked a group of us why we bothered employing financial advisers. “Are you too dumb to look after your own money?” he asked, unable to understand why we would want to hand over anything to middlemen.

I bought a house in Birmingham for £205,000 when I joined Aston Villa in the early 1990s, but the market slumped and I sold it at a big loss when I moved to Celtic and it caused me a lot of stress. Players from my generation and earlier were well paid, but we were not set for life. A good few from my era do manual work, such as painting and decorating, because their pensions or investments did not work out as well as they had hoped.

The consolation is that, despite the dire warnings of Lord Triesman, the FA chairman, top-flight football is booming, so there will not be the bankruptcies we have seen in the financial sector. You are safer at Manchester City than in the City.