Oh, please no. No more. No more lavish summer spending spree. No more sources close to the wantaway World Cup ace. No more just one more week to go and we’ll be bringing you all the latest ins and outs from the Premier League’s big-hitters. Please. Won’t somebody just make it stop?

The current Premier League transfer window faces some stiff competition in its bid to establish itself as unarguably the most tedious and debilitating transfer window ever. Not only is the bar set vertiginously high but there is a natural parallax error here as the current transfer window always feels like the worst transfer window, for the simple reason that it’s happening right there at that precise moment, an unceasing pressure itching away relentlessly like an aggressive fungal infection of the inner ear.

Plus, of course, it is important to remember that the relative tedium of a summer transfer window is not necessarily measurable in monetary terms. Two years ago total summer transfer spend in the Premier League was £490m. Last year it was a record £630m. This year we are again on target to set a new high but in a way such grand-scale financial incontinence is something of a relief.

Transfers that actually happen are at least dignified by the sense of some basic human activity going on, an actual thing that has actually happened. Albeit this has been diluted a little this summer by the new fashion for “celebrating” transfers, as though what has happened is in itself a sporting victory, a moment to gloat and crow, rather than just another example of football’s desire to spread itself across every space like a kind of gangrenous corporate hunger.

In the past week Liverpool’s potential signing of Mario Balotelli has already been exhaustively deconstructed as though this is in itself a thing, a piece of actual football, a happening to be chronicled forever in the club annals. This was always likely to happen with Balotelli, who is as much a news event as an actual footballer, a worthy, stop-start centre forward, but an all-time hyper-galactico when it comes to doing funny things with cars and hats, a player whose signing proves once again that the Premier League is still undoubtedly the best in the world when it comes to doing things with cars and hats.

Even worse, though, are the transfers that don’t happen, which obviously won’t happen, but which somehow still seem to happen all the same, a unceasing human churn, like the opening credits of the World At War where the faces of the dead and the lost appear and then melt away into a kind of viscous human gloop. Most notably Sami Khedira – or rather the idea of Sami Khedira, the object of diffuse desire that is Sami Khedira – seems to have evolved during the current window into a profound kind of omni-absence, his name a mournful whale song accompaniment to the summer, incanted beneath the everyday business of real life as though the acquisition of Sami Khedira represents all that is left of hope and life and love.

Of course there is a more obviously destructive side to all this. It might sound like a revolutionary idea given the sheer crazed, gurning acquisitiveness of peak-window greed, but signing players is a choice rather than a necessity. Change is not always good. Addition can be dilution. It seems fairly clear clubs sign too many players now, driven on by a pre-existing machinery that is already in place – funds, window PLC executives, a climate of ambient hunger – and those whose business it is to encourage change, whose working existence depends on instability.

It is only natural something will be lost along the way. Not just money – and transfers are the machinery by which huge amounts of money disappear from football – but in terms of teams and players. Historically the greatest teams have been a product of process and nurture. Alex Ferguson spent five years building a team that lasted for 20. Bill Shankly took two years to get Liverpool out of the Second Division and five to win a trophy. The best and richest modern mega-clubs still try, for all their commercial muscle, to build teams. Not so in the top tier in England, which remains a dry league, a place where football teams are staged rather than produced, and in which the idea of slow-burn team-building is now largely absent.

A player as good as Trevor Brooking will never again be allowed simply to remain grandly in place at West Ham, like some impoverished earl striding the halls of his ancestral pile, worrying about the chapel spire, listening to the mice behind the library walls.

Norwich City will never again be allowed to have a team capable of playing Bayern Munich, just as we will never know how engaging and fraught with familial triumph Southampton’s now-disbanded team might have been. Money will no longer permit this kind of semi-sustainable growth. These days the barbarians are at the gates pretty much immediately pillaging the grain store, massacring the first-borns, hacking away with their double-sided axes.

And so, here we are, in the dog days of August, gearing up for that final week when the whole sporting world seems briefly to turn a shade of transfer window.

In reality there is little to be done beyond perhaps introducing some checks and balances. It seems obvious that the window itself should be confined entirely to the off-season. It could even be abolished altogether, if only to take the air out of the system, like legalising and regulating some terribly destructive narcotic. Mainly, though, what is needed is a greater sense of window-scepticism, of resisting at every level football’s managed rapaciousness. There will be those who blame “the media” for all this, but the fact is you get the media you deserve and the current fug of transactional inanity only exists because enough people are very obviously willing to consume it.

Perhaps rather than be celebrated, transfers should be publicly mourned. Those that must, unavoidably, take place should be announced in funeral tones, like news of some disastrous military defeat, another aircraft carrier sunk in the south Atlantic. For all the sweaty-palmed propaganda it is still possible to fight back against the machines.

Death to the window. Death to the transfer industry. Viva (real, actual non-transactional) football.