Opinion | Home and Away: Gluttony of transfer window is enough to make you sick
Greed in the English Premier League resembles excesses of TV show Man v. Food - but you can't help stay tuned to the perversity
There is a TV series you may have seen called Man v. Food, the format of which sees the presenter (a suitably rotund, jolly man) traverse the diners of North America to take up house-special challenges.
Said man is dared to eat against the clock a supersized or super-spiced (or both) dish - from giant pizzas, steaks and burgers to red-hot chilli dogs, hell-fried chicken wings and nuclear burritos.
Finish every last morsel and to the hall of fame a photo is pinned and the bill binned. Fail and you pay up in shame.
Now we have players signed up on perverse and expensive hire-purchase agreements, the reckless 'never-never that says it's all right to play and cheer now, only to pay heavily and regret later
The gluttony knows no bounds, and during the half-hour of quirky camera angles, stage-managed quips, greasy-queasy HD jowls and whooping flushed chefs and bloated diners, you witness all that is absurd and ethically corrupt about the indulgent free world and plight of the underfed third.
Yet the slick production and adversarial conceit makes this kitsch food-porn compulsive viewing. You can't help stay tuned and angrily cheer on the food mountain to win one over the slobbering human, hoping the triple helping of crassness and greed eats itself in a choking fit of frothing condiment.
The 2014 English Premier League transfer window left a similar bad taste when it closed on Monday because its own rapacity resembled too closely the culinary exploits on the flat screen.
In this new era of "frugality" under Uefa Financial Fair Play (FFP) laws, the EPL duly spent a record £858 million (HK$10.85 billion) gross this summer - up £200 million on last year's lavish spend.
English top-flight clubs splashed out more than Spain's La Liga (£425 million), Italy's Serie A (£260 million) and France's Ligue 1 (£100 million) combined. Germany's Bundesliga spent a frugal £250 million.