Such are the laws of supply and demand, that top financial advisors are happy to turn away the nouveau riche professional footballer in favor of the ancestrally wealthy.

Timothy Whiting of Timothy James and Partners tells Financial Advisor 

“The thing we find with footballers is they can be quite fickle, every time they move to a different club they change agent and accountant and lawyer and financial adviser.

And of course that means the time horizon of their investment portfolio is often shorter than we think is appropriate, so they are not appropriate clients for us right now.”

If this had been Cazenove, I could have understood. Apparently clients with 30,000 acres of Norfolk are in short supply so Timothy James rolls out a slightly less red carpet to American film and rockstars who find themselves in need of a high- class concierge;

The second challenge, [Timothy Whiting] added, is that many of those clients aren’t from traditionally affluent backgrounds, and may need help interacting with the fee paying schools and particular professional services such as estate agents in desirable locations, something he is able to help with as part of his financial planning service.

It really is shocking how few clients are to the manor born.

The management of the financial affairs of someone new to money is fraught because the financial advisor has to be beholden to promoters, managers and be part of the retinue of lawyers, accountants , stylists and health gurus who attend on the burgeoning bank balance.

It is too easy to say that the job of the financial adviser is to advise that most of these people are nothing but pariahs. But that is not in the script;- without them, the short-lived glory days would become a career and that is not what the Tic-Toc generation are much interested in. They want to see the £30,000 Crystal bills and the ravaged noses, so that they can take comfort that they , unlike their idols, have a future beyond 40.

For every Jude Bellingham there is a Deli Ali, the fruits of fame have a sell by date and no one wants to know a star with a yellow label. It’s Carpe Diem and “fickle” is the word.

But all the same, there is a side of me that wonders what a wealth manager is really doing in the pages of Financial Advisor. Isn’t the job of the wealth manager as Tim Whiting puts it, to manage wealth over time regardless of the client’s management team.

Can’t footballers be sat down and counselled that a financial plan is for life and not till the end of the contract?

The main point of the article is that it takes a great deal of wealth to qualify for bespoke fund management and that even the affluent have to make do with “model portfolios” (reassuringly expensive). At the top of the advisory tree is the fund picker and only the most wealthy clients get access to fund pickers.

Somewhere along the line, the idea of a financial mentor has been exchanged for a financial guru. I can understand that with stratospheric earnings, footballers will have separate tax advisers, lawyers , promotional managers and so on, but it sounds what they need most of all is a friend.