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Hugo Slim, the Mexican-Lebanese entrepreneur who is, after Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, the third richest man in the world, likes to say that before a crisis there is always "an excess of excess". We may be living through the greatest economic disaster since the 1930s but football, at the highest level, continues blithely on in its own decadent way, wedded to a bewildering culture of excess.
Real Madrid's signings of first Kaka (for £56million) and then a few days later Cristiano Ronaldo (for £80m) have created an even greater sense of reckless irresponsibility as well as inflation in a market that, by any reckoning, should be in recession.
Football increasingly operates beyond rational constraint. Clubs such as Liverpool and Manchester United are oppressed by debt acquired during leveraged takeovers by American billionaires, but Liverpool, for instance, have just bid £18.5m for an okayish right-back. Work that out.
Chelsea and Manchester City are free to spend recklessly because the stupendous wealth of their owners means football, to them, is merely a source of idle amusement, the plaything of the international plutocracy.
Yet all of this creates a climate in which a teenager such as Daniel Sturridge, who has played but a handful of games for Manchester City, can reportedly reject a lucrative contract offer because he thinks (or is told by his agent) he should be among the club's highest earners, who include international superstars such as Robinho. Well, that will be £140,000 per week then, Sir.
Meanwhile, Samuel Eto'o demands a net salary of £850,000 per month if he is to join City. And who can blame him when everyone else in this mad football world, with its rapacious, winner-takes-all ethos, is out for himself?
But this is not simply excess; this is a pornography of Slim's "excess of excess". There's something deeply and morally reprehensible about what is going on, especially as the signs of incipient crisis are all around us, from falling attendances at middle-ranked clubs in the Premier League to Setanta's financial worries.
In 1992, AC Milan signed Gianluigi Lentini for a then world record £13.5m. His salary was £40,000 per week.
At the time, there was widespread disgust that a club would risk so much on one player. In the event, Lentini was a failure at Milan. Not long after his transfer he almost died in a car accident; he ended up playing only 33 games before leaving for Atalanta.
After this debacle, football retrenched. Transfer fees fell and wage demands were more restrained. It was not until 1996, when Alan Shearer joined Newcastle from Blackburn for £15 million, that the world transfer record was broken again.
Will the Ronaldo deal mark the end of this latest period of excess? It's unlikely, sadly, simply because the international plutocracy is immune even to catastrophic recession. They are free to spend what they want, when they want and on whom. If there is hope, it lies in the disgust many of us feel for the recklessness of Real Madrid President Florentino Perez.
"Spending that much money on someone that can get injured or be in bad form isn't correct to me, especially during this period of financial uncertainty," said Madrid defender Cristoph Metzelder this week of Ronaldo's signing.
It's worth recalling, too, that Barcelona, whom Perez so envies, won the Champions League with a squad including seven products of its own youth system. Therein lies true glory.
Jenson beats Lewis on and off track
In March 2005, when I was editor of the Observer Sport Monthly, I decided, against the wishes of colleagues, to dedicate the cover of the magazine to Jenson Button. He was, I wrote, the man “to save Formula One” (F1, it seems, is always in crisis, always in need of saving).
As it turned out, Button was not the man to save F1: until this season he had won only one race as my former colleagues never tired of reminding me. At times, he seemed even barely competent at the wheel.
So his success this season, in his Brawn car, has been an unexpected pleasure. I told you so!
Another surprise of this season has been Lewis Hamilton's struggles. When he first emerged Hamilton seemed to be a genuinely radical new presence and role model: a black man from an ordinary family in a rich white man's sport.
It's a pity, then, that he so quickly conformed to F1 stereotype, living in predictable tax exile in Switzerland, with the obligatory pop star girlfriend, and seldom speaking a word of interest in interviews.
I once thought that Hamilton, not Button (that cover was just a gimmick in a quiet month), was the man to save F1, opening up the sport to a whole new demographic.
It hasn't really happened. Like Tiger Woods before him, Hamilton is blandly apolitical, safe and sanitised in the company of his cluster of corporate sponsors.
If he didn't exist, then the media would have invented him and to a degree they have.
Hamilton increasingly doesn't seem to exist in any real way.
This week's reason to be cheerful . . .
For the British, tennis is not a game, wrote Tim Adams in his book On Being John McEnroe, it's a fortnight. And now the fortnight is upon us, with all its attendant hype and hysteria and weather-worry. The inevitable jingoism of the BBC's Wimbledon coverage is something to dread — “Oh, will this be Andy's year?”, Sue Barker will ask breathlessly until the moody Scot falls — but there is still much to celebrate as the All England Club prepares to open its gates to the world, not least the glorious longevity of the Williams sisters, whom I would rather watch any day over the latest model to roll off the eastern European production line of long-legged grunters. Let it all unfurl.
* Jason Cowley is editor of the New Statesman
