Premier League money has lost all meaning amid chaotic spectacle of excess | Barney Ronay

The big reveal was always the bit where they came back a year later and saw how much the value had shifted. Because all conversations about houses are, in the end, an excuse to talk about money. Oh wow, it’s gone up by £20,000. You are good. Oh no, you’re now bankrupt and your flat looks like a hostage cell with fairy lights. Unlucky. You are bad.

What the study found was that prices basically always increased. Ripping out the stairs, living in a tent in the garden, arguing about what to do with the two-and-a-halfth bedroom – all of this was irrelevant. These were the boom times of the early 2000s, UK housing recast as a global money trap, an endlessly whirling laundromat, a bricks and mortar central bank bond.

These people could have bought their run-down three-bed, left it empty and done absolutely nothing for two years. The price would have still gone up. That drama about exactly which shade of Anaconda Breath Morgue And Cakebread Mega-Gloss to use in the underfloor wine cave? Just doesn’t matter. Buy the soil. Shut the door. Let money do its thing.

And yes, this is a way of talking about the 2026 summer transfer window, and the way in which everyone has basically now been Chelsea-ed. Think back four years to the start of the age of Clearlake, the first post-Roman spree. At that time it seemed impossible there could be a profitable outcome. Chelsea were out there buying the vintage copper-plate statement bidet. Chelsea were digging out a third sub-basement. Who will redeem this expense? Who will provide a similarly deranged response to such overinvestment?

Well, it turns out the market will do this for you. If you’d predicted then that Chelsea would miss out on the Champions League and go through five permanent managers, but still make a profit from selling Enzo Fernández, would anyone have believed it?

Or that Mykhailo Mudryk could run around briefly like a deranged hamster, get banned for failing a drugs test and still become a potential growth asset? This is pre-subprime crash energy. Yes, you can install a solar-powered mega-wetroom that fires sourdough breadsticks directly into your eyes. Whatever. Ownership is all. Money will take care of you.

There are still levels to this. The one Chelsea thing to shift in the window is that the curtain has now been drawn on those initial eight months, the period where Todd Boehly became the world’s worst director of football, a director of football who basically didn’t know what football was.

That period has now been safely capped off. Only two players remain. Rough out the numbers and Chelsea spent something like £200m in fees, wages, leaks and cuts, with only Malo Gusto and Wesley Fofana to show for it. No real damage. Money comes, money goes. We roll on.

This is the lesson of the latest summer transfer window. Right now it doesn’t really matter what you do in the Premier League. Just being in it is the thing. With one caveat, which is that nobody actually knows what’s happening here. We can marvel at a record window. We can see the biggest spenders are Manchester City on £457.5m, the lowest Crystal Palace on about £50m, the highest net Liverpool on £216.8m. We can pore over Aston Villa buying the bones of a new squad for £56.7m net gain.

But we can’t know what it means, at least not financially. This is part of the design of money on this scale. As the then Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan put it in a famous speech on the mysteries of big money: “How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions?”

Nobody knew what this meant then. Nobody knows what it means now. “Irrational exuberance” is a good phrase, one Greenspan later said came to him in the bath. It was designed to convey the essential point: opacity, vagueness, invisible flows. If not for those actually riding the tide, because someone is always making money. Someone out there actively wants the Premier League’s financial chaos, and is benefiting from it gloriously.

Otherwise, reading the runes is just a matter of guesswork. Money moves between networked entities. Everyone inside wins. Everyone outside pays for it. But still, this feels new, if only in its extremity.

This was captured by the weirdness of Sky Sports’ transfer deadline programme on Tuesday. At one point a man appeared strumming a guitar, smiling as if he had just filleted a litter of kittens in his basement, and sang a Bradley Barcola Liverpool song to the tune of Don’t Dream It’s Over, like this is all just normal and fine.

Later there was a golden period at about 5.30pm where every deal just seemed wrong and impossible, a fever dream after an over-ripe seafood risotto. Aston Villa have paid £47m for an 18-year-old winger. Gabriel Jesus is going to Barcelona. Jack Grealish is having a medical at Everton, an event that seems to prove the non-linear nature of time, a medical that is always happening, never not happening, a constant time-space event.

Meanwhile two private jets are on the tarmac in Lyon as three clubs try to sign Malick Fofana. “We STILL don’t know what Malick Fofana is thinking,” the man with the microphone concluded, mournfully, and this seemed profoundly true and on point. We don’t. Does Malick Fofana even know this? If so, how can he? Nobody else has a clue what’s going on.

It is worth trying to list the best deals. Harry Wilson on a free can only be good. Djed Spence to Inter is great. Forza, Djed. Barcola to Liverpool for £123m is lots of money, but he’s really young and knows how to score once he’s settled.

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