Deadline day hysteria, a game at bursting point? No, this is the new normal

One way to contemplate the mind-boggling millions Premier League clubs have spent signing footballers in this record-breaking transfer window is to reach for the handy device of the illustrated dictionary. Look up the word inflation now, and it gives you a picture of Kyle Walker. Amid the maelstrom of arrivals and departures as the clubs have repeatedly dipped into their deeper money pots – leaving Paris Saint-Germain’s excesses to one side as a special case – Walker’s fee, £50m, stands as a price barometer.

The right‑back he has replaced at Manchester City, Pablo Zabaleta, was a thoroughbred when they signed him in 2008, aged 23, from Espanyol; already an Argentina international. The fee, for a supremely consistent full‑back who proceeded to play 417 matches for City through their Abu Dhabi‑fuelled reconstruction, was reported to have been £6.45m.

Yet if the instinct is to bridle at a game gone mad again, and see the spending, a gross £1.24bn by the 20 clubs at the start of deadline day, as a bubble inflating to bursting point, the reality is more balanced. City’s £50m for Walker may be considered a huge premium (for all the England full-back’s dynamic talents), but this overall level of vast spending can more genuinely be considered the new normal.

Last summer’s £1.2bn, itself a record, and this summer’s surpassing of that have been the first in which the Premier League clubs have been handling their share of the £8.4bn, 2016‑19 TV deals. This bonanza, reaped from BT’s challenge to BSkyB for the golden prize of football supporters’ direct debits, and the rising value of the Premier League as media content overseas, meatily exceeds the £5.14bn the clubs fed on in the previous three years.

In June the Premier League published the clubs’ share of this £2.4bn annual feast – £400m was set aside principally for parachute payments; £100m, 3.6% of the total, is invested in grassroots facilities and projects. All but the three relegated clubs were paid more each than that total for the whole football community nationally. Sunderland, who finished bottom and have struggled for years to make convincing signings, were paid £93m. The champions, Chelsea, earned the most, as the payment structure rewards finishing places in the table and the number of times a club is shown live on television. Their total, £151m, was utterly inconceivable when the First Division clubs first burrowed their way out of sharing TV money with the other three divisions of the Football League and formed the breakaway Premier League 25 years ago.

City were the second highest, banking £147m; Liverpool were paid £146m; Tottenham Hotspur £145m. The middle‑ranking clubs all made comfortably more than £100m. Bournemouth’s share of the TV money was £118m. Nobody in the history of football ever foresaw that sentence being written.

For the clubs who competed in the Champions League, add the lucre from their hearty share of the €1.3bn Uefa distributed last season, and their TV earnings alone exceeded £200m. Yet just as Uefa implemented financial fair play (FFP) rules to prevent all this boom-time money leaking through to players and their agents, the Premier League did the same in anticipation of the first massive BT-induced increase of 2013-16.

Renewed last year until the end of the 2018-19 season, the Premier League’s financial regulations limit the losses clubs can make and cap the amount by which they can increase player wage bills, to £7m on the previous year. The intention – spelled out by the Stoke City owner, Peter Coates, when the rules were introduced – was, “We cannot have all the new money going in inflated wages and payments to agents … We will have the same players, they won’t get better because we pay them more.”

Uefa’s FFP and the Premier League regulations do not apply to transfer fees in themselves, but these have to be aligned with the need to approach breaking even every year, and to not swell the wage bill too much. The introduction of the Premier League rules for 2013-14 instantly recalibrated most clubs into financial stability – 15 made a profit whereas just eight had done so the previous season .

The fees being paid now are eye‑watering, the wages are unthinkable, the top agents’ fees – often payable to their bases in tax havens – difficult to accept, but most clubs are in fact living within their outsized means.

Within that context there are variations in clubs’ management and internal politics; how shrewd they are with their bounty, how well they assess the improvements they could make to their squads, how efficiently they negotiate the multiple transfer-market hurdles. Across Europe, with the Premier League riches so far exceeding those of the other leagues – the TV deal is twice the value of the Bundesliga’s – there is a premium for players signed, as clubs see the English coming.

In the frenzy there is no time taken for bigger questions. Last summer, after England were defeated by Iceland in the European Championship, there was a short period of breast-beating about the paucity of England-qualified players gaining experience at the highest level. This summer there has been no international tournament and the football world is consumed by watching Premier League clubs wield their spending power again.

As ever, the overwhelming majority of signings are of overseas players, from European clubs. Of last season’s top six clubs, by the morning of transfer deadline day, the only England-qualified players recruited were Walker and Alex Oxlade‑Chamberlain by Liverpool. The other 21 players, mostly bought at vast cost for first teams, were from overseas. In the out columns, as ever, are long trails of English players who have been at the clubs since their infancy, being released or loaned out.

Now all young footballers and their parents should clearly see the reality of their prospects: England’s top clubs can spend £50m on a 27-year-old ready-made England right-back and still be living within their means.