The names of young footballers have rolled across the bottom of our screens this summer, twinned with the Monopoly money figures that have become their alternative identities. Their name is money and money is their name and we hang their transfer fees around their necks like dog tags that can be ripped off one day as the evidence of what their worth to us once was.
Jack Grealish from Aston Villa to Manchester City for £100million. Cristian Romero from Atalanta to Spurs for £47m. Danny Ings from Southampton to Aston Villa for £25m. Ben White from Brighton to Arsenal for £50m. Jadon Sancho from Borussia Dortmund to Manchester United for £73m. Ibrahima Konate from RB Leipzig to Liverpool for £36m.
And that is before we even start on Harry Kane, who might go from Spurs to Manchester City for £130m, £150m or £160m depending on how hard Daniel Levy wants to play ball.
Jack Grealish is the biggest of some very expensive transfers to take place this summer
Harry Kane and Romelu Lukaku could yet still break Jack Grealish's British transfer record fee
And that is before we even start on Romelu Lukaku, who might go from Inter Milan to Chelsea for £100m or £110m, depending on how interested Roman Abramovich has become in football again.
It is easy to be excited by it. Not the money part. But by the prospect of seeing Grealish playing for City, by what happens to his game when he has even better players around him than he did at Villa, by the idea that he might make City even better to watch than they are already, by the fact that Grealish playing Champions League football can only be good news for the England team.
The same goes for the other players. There is already a sense of anticipation about seeing what they bring to their new clubs, starting with City’s match against Leicester City in the Community Shield. It is like that every summer. New signings bring a sense of renewal and sometimes a sense of hope and optimism, too.
But this summer, there is another feeling. It is an overwhelming sense of exasperation that after everything English football has been through over the last 18 months — its financial missteps, its financial hardships and its bitter internecine warfare over the European Super League — it should slip back into its old recklessness so effortlessly.
I know there is an intoxication about new signings but have we really forgotten what happened last year?
Have we really forgotten how some of our leading clubs pleaded poverty and went to the Government cap in hand asking to be subsidised with our money for furlough payments? As nine-figure sums of money change hands for one player, have we really forgotten that so quickly?
It's like the European Super League debacle of last season has been forgotten about
That was always going to be the danger with the ESL plan in particular — once the crisis of the pandemic began to ease, everybody would forget how the leading clubs tried to destroy English football out of greed and everything would return to normal. But have we really just settled back into the old routine so quickly?
Have we lapsed straight back into a free-for-all? Have we forgotten absolutely everything that we were lamenting? Maybe the leading clubs can afford it — although they were awfully quick to hit the panic button when some of their revenue streams dried up — but that is not really the point. The point is that the leading clubs do not exist in isolation. They are
