Tantrums, hysteria and endless cash, but who won the window?

The emotional juggernaut was all wrapped up in a single three-month tracking shot, but this summer market told us something deeper - about football, and the nation

- Barney Ronay

By the time the clock hit 7.30pm the main presenter on Monday's Sky Sports Window Slam Countdown looked not just frazzled, but oddly heroic, like a man who has ingested a potentially fatal overdose of late-breaking excitement and is now being encouraged to keep talking in a low, dogged voice about massive deals and unexpected snags just to keep himself awake until the paramedics arrive.

There was something of the Situation Room about the tableau, five nobly dishevelled talking heads leaning in around the curved tables, lists of names earnestly reeled off. Eberechi Eze. Randal Kolo Muani. We're hearing that Coventry has fallen. In the bottom corner of the screen a picture of Marc Guéhi would flash up now and then reproachfully, Guéhi wearing a strange, lost smile as though he has in fact died. And below it all the countdown clock replaced with the simple end-of-days message: WINDOW CLOSED.

But the man behind the desk was also right. Name a more sensational window. Or at least a more all-encompassing window, a sustained emotional, strategic, plot-driven entertainment product, all wrapped up in a single epic three-month tracking shot. So the fact we now have to play an actual football season feels like being told you've got to go for a walk on Christmas morning after opening all your presents by 8.30am, already crashing through the floor on chocolate orange segments.

We must recite the numbers now, because the Premier League's numbers are, as ever, boom-time numbers. A record £3.1bn spent! A record £1.4bn trading loss! The Premier League's top five spent more, gross, on players than all the big five leagues combined. Reeling this off is like striding the floor of some wild early noughties boiler room trading room. Ring the bell. Unleash the cocaine leopards. Cue the champagne-spraying montage, the rueful voiceover about FBI investigations.