FSOM: Transfer deadline day is a manufactured event staged by TV to heighten the drama – each year it becomes a more unseemly spectacle than the last

There must be something wrong with FSOM.

He’s probably not right in the head, a little bit off-whack, but he may not be the only one.

FSOM does not like Deadline Day.

While most of football fandom pees its pants over the circus that is Deadline Day, FSOM will happily crawl into a cave and block up the entrance like a grizzly bear preparing to hibernate for the winter.

As far as FSOM is concerned Deadline Day is a manufactured event staged by TV to heighten the drama for the weak of bladder.

After all, when you have rolling, 24-hour sports channels, you have to fill it with something and what better than chewing gum for the eyes, spiced up with rabid, over-hyped on-the-spot reporters frothing at the mouth as blacked-out limos pass through training ground barriers. It’s Hollywood drama played out in carparks. It’s what the Romans called bread and circuses, specially made for the empty-headed mouth-breathers.

Deadline Day is live, televised willy-swinging for supporters who are as excited as kiddies on Christmas Eve, sitting around the haunted goldfish tank desperately clamouring to see which over-priced prima donna their club has signed for the price of a super yacht, so that he can hare down to the club shop on Deadline Day plus one, to buy a replica shirt (hopefully with a long and convoluted foreign name which costs extra to print across the shoulders) to be worn down the pub to parade in front of his mates.

Deadline Day is, though, the climacteric apogee of that other exercise in football ostentation, the Transfer Window.

The transfer window provides clubs with their opportunity to take part in a soccer Supermarket Sweep and load up on the mother of spending sprees, filling not one, but several trollies. It’s the football equivalent of the last big shop before Christmas and each year it becomes a more unseemly spectacle than the last.

This year’s summer window, which opened on June 15 and slammed shut at 11pm on September 1, bordered on obscenity, with Premier league clubs splurging a record £3.55billion on players. That’s more than the GDP of African countries like Sierra Leone and Liberia.

Leading the way, of course, were Manchester City who splashed out £456m. That was offset by sales of £307m which apparently counts as good business but still amounted to a net spend of £149m.

The spree included £125m for Argentinian wind-up merchant Enzo Fernandez, and £116m for Elliot Anderson. Add in £85.6m for Ayyoub Bouaddi and £60m for Iliman Ndiaye, along with several others, and it appears City snub their blue noses at any threats posed by the 115 charges hanging over them for breaches of fair-play spending rules.

The summer window spending spree is in addition to the little bit of beefing up City did in the January window when they added Marc Guehi and Antoine Semenyo to their squad.

Not far behind were Chelsea, who broke their club transfer record with the addition of £117m Morgan Rogers from Aston Villa, along with France defender Maxence Lacroix for a relatively cheap £52m and comparatively bargain basement signings in Geovany Quenda (£40m from Sporting CP) and Marco Palestra (£47m from Atalanta).

They recouped spondulicks from the sale of Fernandez, Andrey Santos to Manchester United (£48m), Marc Cucurella to Real Madrid (£51.8m), Liam Delap to Nottingham Forest (£50m).

Champions Arsenal flexed their credit card by snapping up Bruno Guimaraes from Newcastlen (£75m), Ezri Konsa from Villa (£55m), Christos Tzolis from Club Brugge (£34m) and made Piero Hincapie’s loan from Bayer Leverkusen permanent (£34.5m).

Tottenham’s attempt to avoid a repeat of last season’s Houdini-style escape from relegation was to go ape and throw money like confetti, adding 10 players to their squad – including Sandro Tonali from Newcastle (£92.5m) and Mateus Fernandes, who is looking to avoid a hat-trick after being relegated in successive seasons with Southampton and West Ham (£85m).

Over half the Premier League clubs broke their individual transfer record during the summer window in this Bacchanalian orgy of spending.

Of course, the Premier League loves it as it serves to enforce its self-proclaimed title of the biggest in the world (even if the best players in the world are playing in LaLiga) and English clubs have only won the Champions League three times in the last 10 years and seven times in the 21st century.

While the money spent is almost obscene, the argument is that it stays within the game. That’s an argument as thin as a Rizla cigarette paper in a sport where trickle-down economics is a bigger myth than Susquatch or Bigfoot. Try telling clubs in lower reaches of League Two that the money stays in the game and it certainly doesn’t wash even lower down at grassroots level where football is played on pitches that resemble fields ploughed for potato planting and changing facilities which attract the attention of the biological warfare agency.

Of course, the people to feel sorry for on deadline day are the head coaches.

Recruitment has changed out of recognition and with so much money at stake, it may not be wise to leave it in the hands of one person – the manager.

Time was the manager was responsible for player recruitment. His network of trusted scouts would don their flat caps, tie their scarves round their necks, turn their coat collars up and brave the chill midweek winds to journey to a lower league to run his trained and keen eye hoping to unearth a young diamond or the experienced tough warrior to beef up the midfield or bolster the defence.

The nod would be given to the manager: ‘I think you need to take a look at this one, boss’ who would then trot off himself to check the player out before schmoozing the chairman or banging a Serrano ham sized fist on the boardroom table to demand a loosening of the club purse strings.

And to be fair, the manager lived or died on his ability to spot talent and sign players. It was all on his shoulders,

Somewhere along the way it changed and like the scene in Moneyball where Billy Beane fires the scouts who identify players by sight in favour of the computer geek who signs them based on their stats, so football clubs changed their recruitment policies and methods.

Clubs now have recruitment departments where Poindexters who have never got mud on their knees or wouldn’t know a football if one smacked them between the eyes, play with algorithms and scan data bases for players who match the required profile. He’s unlikely to be that young League Two diamond waiting to be discovered, but a player from Bundesliga Zwei or the Polish II Iiga who fits the metrics.

The manager will not jet off to cast an eye over him, because there is no manager.

The manager is now the head coach, who might have some form of veto over players on a list he is presented with, but otherwise has to work with the players the recruitment computer geeks cough up for him.

It could mean that FSOM has company in his dislike of deadline day. Head coaches probably aren’t as keen as mustard, as they see their best players sold while the players coming in are as big a mystery as the ingredients for your gran’s Christmas pudding.

The only blessing in disguise for this tectonic plate shift in managerial roles is that Deadline Day no longer has Harry Redknapp running through it like the lettering in a stick of seaside rock.

Oh, how TV loved Redknapp on Deadline Day, with his beetroot red face and cheeky demeanour as he spun plates, juggled balls and pulled rabbits out of hats before coming up with an Emmanuel Adebayor, or Paolo Di Canio, or a Paulo Futre or Marco Boogers!

Like a faded old variety hall conjuror, deadline day has no place for Redknapp’s tricks and feats of transfer legerdemain, and neither does the over-hyped deadline day coverage.

So Redknapp, if you watch a snippet of deadline day coverage through gritted teeth before switching it off, there’s plenty of room in the cave alongside me.