After a wild €2.25bn spree, who can doubt that the Premier League is unstoppable?

Remember the pandemic? Remember when we thought nothing would be the same again? Remember when we thought the damage done to football’s finances was so severe that transfer fees might never recover? We were part right. This summer, Premier League clubs have spent €2.25bn (£1.94bn), more than La Liga, Serie A, the Bundesliga and Ligue 1 combined.

The net spend is even more remarkable: €1.35bn for Premier League clubs, with La Liga a distant second on €52.44m (and then only because of Barcelona’s lever-driven splurge).

Nottingham Forest have spent more than every Championship and Brazilian club combined. And for all the concerns about whether their new squad can gel, perhaps that is the only way for a promoted club to compete. What is the alternative? Who wants to be Bournemouth, scorned for spending a meagre €27m, which is the same as the entire Greek league?

On the one hand, of course, this is all very exciting. We get to see players such as Erling Haaland, Darwin Núñez and Casemiro in the Premier League. Every day, we get the dopamine rush of our clubs signing players for €20m, €50m, €100m.

The great transfer mill trundles on, one of those rare phenomena that seems to benefit everybody: the players who improve their terms; the agents who take a slice; the directors who can swagger about after landing a star or congratulate themselves on their acuity in snaffling a prospect; the marketers who can build new campaigns around new blood; the fans who can dream that this, at last, will be the final piece of the jigsaw; the journalists who filter the rumours, analyse where the new player will fit and pontificate about what it all means in columns such as this.

Little wonder there now seems a subculture more fascinated by the