I have just decided to compose a small piece on the recent developments in the footballing (soccer) world. My reasons are simple - to understand what you think of the current situation.

Deep in the dawn of a darkening depression we find ourselves saving every penny, eating things we don't really like because they're cheap (super market own brand mayo), and cycling everywhere even though my fair city of Bristol is laden with hills and rain. Yet in the midst of this complicated time I constantly find myself reading about astronomical fees being paid for the services of some of the world’s best football players. Admittedly, the main protagonist in the theatre of the absurd is the Spanish giant Real Madrid, who can afford to lavish the national debt of Liberia on two players - Kaka (£50m) and Cristiano Ronaldo (£80m) - simply because of their monarchical (and thus state) connections.

The wiping of Real Madrid's debt by the state notwithstanding, how can any club justify paying these sums for athletes to run around on what is essentially an over perused garden, shepherding a spherical pig skin into a shed with a net? It baffles me. It brings into conflict everything I have ever learnt about economics, which admittedly is not very much. As much as I understand that spending is going to bring us out of this economic demise, part of the problem in the first place (as was also the case with the dotcom bust) is hyper inflated and over-valued prices - the more we overvalue products and the more we pay in full for overvalued products the more we push market values upwards toward a level of unsustainability. And then the market crashes. The warning signs are already there as we see the pattern proliferate; players that were worth around £20m last season (Sergio Aguero and Frank Ribery) are now being valued at £45m and £65m respectively!!

So are we essentially cutting our nose off to spite our face? Is spending these large sums initially going to bring us out of a recession (somewhat) only to keep the market values of these players so hyper inflated that we will be paying 150% of their "actual value" for the next 5-8 years? If this is the case then surely we're just heading toward another crash. And the worst of it all is that it ruins the sport. How are small clubs supposed to compete with prices that are so overvalued? The pattern of overvaluing players trickles down through the divisions (Wolves paying £6.5m for Kevin Doyle-a player who scored 13 goals in 40 games for Reading last season or even Manchester United paying £16m for Antonio Valencia of Wigan - 3 goals in 36 games). Everybody wants a piece of the inflated price-pie and everyone's going to pay the price eventually.

What do you think? Is it justifiable? Is it only going to worsen matters, or will we see prices fall again once some economic stability is re-instated?