When Sven-Göran Eriksson is handed his P45 and ushered through the door of the City of Manchester Stadium, he will step outside with a payoff that swells his fortune from redundancy packages to a sum bigger than most people will earn in a lifetime.

It is less than two years since England's lacklustre World Cup campaign in Germany resulted in the Swede leaving his international post and pocketing £4 million. And with the £2.5 million that Thaksin Shinawatra is expected to hand him to hitch a ride out of Manchester, Eriksson is earning a reputation as the master of the redundancy payout.

A Manchester City fan taking home the average wage of £21,280 would have to work more than 300 years to earn the £6.5million that Eriksson will have been handed to do no more than sit on the terrace of his mansion in southern Sweden, overlooking the picturesque Lake Fryken.

That is assuming, of course, he elects to remain at the 12-bedroom rural retreat, complete with boathouse and private jetty, rather than at his getaway in Estoril, Portugal, said to be so exclusive that only the president of Benfica can afford to rent it from him. Or, perhaps, the spacious apartment in Rome, overlooking the Piazza del Popolo, that, according to those who have visited, boasts one of the most impressive vistas of the city.

What is certain, however, is that he will not seek refuge in the four-bedroom pad in Regent's Park that was his London base. Eriksson bought the house, built by John Nash, the Regency architect, for £2.55 million in July 2001, but sold it last year for a paltry £30,000 profit, in a period when property prices in Greater London had soared by 78 per cent.

Eriksson was not born rich. Speaking of his father during an interview, he said: “For the first two years of my life, he, my mother and I lived in one room of a house we shared with four other families. All five families used the same bathroom. My father drove a lorry, my mother sold newspapers from a kiosk and later worked as a nurse's aid in a hospital.”

His newfound redundancy wealth is a distant dream to those in his mother's former profession. A nurse's aid in a British hospital, working on the minimum wage, would have to work non-stop for 134 years to match Eriksson's unearned £6.5 million.

As well as the two main sources of his income - employment and redundancy - Eriksson has never been shy of exploring other remunerative avenues. He was paid £200,000 for a walk-on part in a Sainsbury's advertisement, alongside Jamie Oliver. He has compiled 44 tracks of his favourite classical music for a triple-CD release, for which he received a reported £50,000 advance. This comes on top of the supposed £200,000 he received for advertising Cirio, an Italian pasta sauce.

As for the crowning glory in the catalogue of his endorsements, one can only wonder what joy awaited the children who snapped up copies of Sven-Göran Eriksson's World Cup Manager and Sven-Göran Eriksson's World Cup Challenge. The video games are available on Amazon.co.uk, priced at the princely sum of 50p for the pair.