Occasionally, Ruud Gullit feels the beat of time on his back these days and the need to seize life's every moment. 

'I'll spend half an hour in the gym and think "that was half an hour that I no longer have left",' he relates, a huge grin playing on his face as always.

He says he remembers the first single he ever bought - Marvin Gaye's 'Let's Get It On', picked up from a record shop in Suriname, from where his father emigrated to the Netherlands - and can't quite feel the same about Taylor Swift, when she, a significant new presence in NFL, sometimes gravitates into Mail Sport's digital realm.

'I have a subscription. I read the Daily Mail every day. The only thing that I didn't understand is what Taylor Swift has to do with the sports pages?' he asks. 'Can you just put it where it belongs and I can read my sport?!!'

NFL has actually experienced a phenomenon it's calling 'the Swift Effect' since the singer started dating Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce last year and became a presence at games, including February's Super Bowl. There's been a 20 per cent increase in sponsorship for the sport since she's been a presence on its scene. It's a new world.

Ruud Gullit was in attendance for the 25th Laureus World Sports Awards on Monday in Madrid

But as that world turns and changes, some of the fundamentals remain the same - like how to build a successful Chelsea team, which Gullit had certainly done before he was sacked by the club's owner, Ken Bates, with the team second in the league, 26 years ago.

The club have splashed half a billion pounds in a few years and yet the Mauricio Pochettino side he saw lose in the FA Cup semi-final blew the best chance they will have to beat Manchester City.

'Horrible,' the 61-year-old says of the way that his old club have unspooled in the past two seasons, lying ninth in the Premier League table. 'It's difficult to buy so many players and make a team of them. It's almost impossible. And there's a lack of quality. A lack of quality for the money they spent. You need to see more.

'The fans are p****d off and I can understand, because if there was any chance for Chelsea to win against City this was it, in the Cup. Because City were knackered. Chelsea had so many opportunities - so many chances to make a goal - and they did nothing. What I saw did not make me happy.

'It's the same that happened with Ajax. They bought 12 players and they were awful. Lack of quality. Chelsea didn't lose to City because they missed chances. No. They just didn't play well. I was amazed. That's the biggest frustration for Chelsea fans. They see good coaches and teams playing unbelievable football. They want that kind of football. I think they made a huge mistake in buying so many players at once.'

And Mauricio Pochettino is not without blame, he says. 'The manager always has to take responsibility. When you take the job you know that reality beforehand.

'I can't blame him (Pochettino). Because it's not easy. But he's responsible - he is - because he took the job. I don't know how long it's going to turn it around.'

Should Pochettino be manager next season? 'I think he needs to be.'

But should he be? 'In Chelsea you never know!'

That much is true. The club have had 20 managers in the 26 years since Gullit was dismissed and he could be forgiven for a little bitterness, observing the dire levels of football that have not cost Pochettino his job, when Bates sacked him the year after he had guided Chelsea to an FA Cup triumph. It was their first trophy in 27 years, becoming the first black manager to win a major British trophy.

There are no regrets that he didn't see the current levels of cash, insists Gullit, a Laureus ambassador, before the annual awards event, which highlights how the organisation uses sport to help those who are less fortunate. 'It's not easy to buy good players. It's the most difficult thing there is, although on paper you think it's a good decision you've made.

'I think I bought a good team. I think I bought the right players. And mingled them with the English players, as well. For me, Dennis Wise was very, very important to me. Steve Clarke was very important to me in that team. Mark Hughes - very, very important. So the English players had a huge impact. Graeme Le Saux also.

'I had those good players that I mingled with foreign players and they learned from the experience of the Europeans and they became better. Even Dennis - he was a team player. Nobody thought that could happen and I told him. He was a national team player!'

This kind of logic seems so relevant to how Chelsea might approach things today, though if there's any consolation for them, it is that the pressure cooker is even hotter at Manchester United.

Two of Gullit's compatriots - Erik ten Hag and Louis van Gaal have failed to drag United out of the more of the past decade or so.

'I'm not disappointed by that,' he says. 'I knew it was going to be a hard job. (Jose) Mourinho didn't do it. Come on! They had good coaches there, no?

'But the players they got there are not the players City would take, or Liverpool would take or Arsenal would take. They were players that were already over-seasoned. Casemiro - a little bit over-seasoned. Jonny Evans, over-seasoned. The bad thing for them was that Lisandro Martinez was injured because he was one of the best players.'

How can that club be sorted out? 'I'm not in charge!' Gullit says. 'It's a difficult one. A very difficult one because they are in the spotlight all of the time. You have [Paul] Scholes, [Rio] Ferdinand, [Gary] Neville - every day talking about them. Every day! And every time they are in television, everything is quoted.

'That is hard. And I know you want the best for the club but if you talk about them all the time - always your eyes are on it. Arsenal, less. Liverpool a little bit but not as much. If I see Daily Mail every day - the first five stories are always about Manchester United! Five, six! It's what it is.'

For all of those teams' struggles, Gullit is seeing what he calls a 'New England' in the players his one-time home country is now developing. Phil Foden, Bukayo Saka and Cole Palmer most excite him. They have taken the team to a very different level of aspiration than in 1988, when Gullit starred for the Dutch in the 3-1 win in the Euros which saw Bobby Robson's team eliminated at the group stage. The Netherlands won that tournament, staged in West Germany.

'In the old days it was all about digging in, character and everything,' he says. 'Players like Glenn Hoddle were too early for the English football. You now have technical players all of a sudden; smaller players who have the ability to play.

'That's the development from England with the foreigners who came in. Sergio Aguero! Small striker! In my days no way! You had all Dion Dublins everywhere! Big guys at the back. That's all changed, so it's a different kind of England.'

Yet it is France and hosts Germany that he views as tournament favourites.

'I understand the view that England are favourites but it's also unbelievable that all the English clubs are almost out, no? A couple of them only in the Conference League. (Just one, Aston Villa, in fact.) That's not where you want to play, eh? For the English to be out of the Champions League already is an unbelievable shock so therefore the English have got to do something about that.'

The summer awaits. The anticipation of the tournament is palpable, rooting Gullit in one of the aspects of life that fundamentally stays the same. 'The velocity of the game might have changed but the beautiful technical demands are exactly the same,' he says, dispatching this correspondent to do something about those Taylor Swift articles. 

'No more of those on your pages, OK?!'

The 25th Laureus World Sports Awards took place on Monday 22 April in Madrid, celebrating the leading names in sport from across the globe. To find out more, visit www.laureus.com