With extra incentives available for eye-catching goals, each banker-footballer would devise yet more extravagantly acrobatic goal-attempts: one minute bicycle-kick volleys, next "look-I-haven't-even-got-my-eyes-open" overhead back-flips-the equivalent of the "rocket science" products of modern finance. One sure thing is that playing it safe would not be on the tactics sheet.

What, then, would this sporting spectacle look like? Eleven grown men, immaculately attired, jostling for position, cart-wheeling and whinnying on a tiny strip of grass where the big money resides, tugging at each other's shirts and trying to wrestle their own team-mates into the mud-while completely ignoring the fact that the ball is quietly being rolled repeatedly into their own net for a series of spectacular own goals.

Let's not forget crowd participation. Amid this disaster, the banker-footballers ask the punters in the crowd for a giant whip-round (or bail-out). Their argument is that banking-football is of such fundamental importance to society that it simply "cannot be allowed to fail".

The punters coughing up the cash to keep the team afloat have a tiny fraction of the money of the banker-footballers themselves. Worse still, what little cash the fans did have is fast disappearing: it was index-linked, unbeknown to them, in line with the performance of the banking-football team, so the fans' houses are nose-diving in value, their investments are collapsing and their pension pots evaporating.