At midnight on Friday, 31st August, the transfer window slammed shut on a period of intense transfer activity by English Premier League clubs.
The summer saw the market inflated in both volume and value terms by the significant injection of funds available to clubs from the latest TV deals, and by the arrival in some Premiership boardrooms of fabulously wealthy individuals or consortia willing and able to spend heavily on new players.
These trends produced one or two slight ironies. For example Chelsea, the club who, in the three previous summers since Roman Abramovich took over at Stamford Bridge had pioneered lavish outlays in the transfer market, were relatively prudent this summer.
Having spent some £30 million on Andriy Shevchenko alone last August, the Blues laid out little more than half that amount this time on eight players, most of them arriving on free transfers. The sale of Arjen Robben to Real Madrid for £24.5 million meant Chelsea even turned a profit as net sellers in this transfer window.
Another irony was that, in the context of growing concern about financial polarisation within English football, the influx of TV revenues helped to democratise the transfer market.
An indicator of this was the fact that in the summer 2006 transfer window, only three Premier League clubs spent more than £20 million on new players. In the summer 2007 window, the number of clubs shelling out more than £20 million had increased to 12. It is no longer just the Big Four who are the Big Spenders.
True, Manchester United and Liverpool led the way with the biggest outlays per club - at or near a staggering £50 million in each case. But Tottenham, Manchester City, West Ham United and Sunderland all spent in excess of £30 million each, while the likes of Portsmouth, Newcastle United, Fulham and Arsenal were all comfortably over the £20 million mark.
It is no coincidence that many of those clubs have acquired wealthy new owners fairly recently, which is perhaps just as well because transfer fees tell only part of the story. Players' salaries complete the tale, at levels guaranteed to make club accountants wince if not weep.
With so much money now flushing through the twice-yearly transfer market, Premiership club managers are able to back their judgement with hard cash like never before. But it is a double-edged sword. They can no longer cite lack of funds to bring in quality when results go pear-shaped. And their expensive purchases must deliver immediately to vindicate the manager's decisions.
Martin Jol at Tottenham is already experiencing how uncomfortable this new accountability can be. After achieving two consecutive fifth-placed finishes, Spurs have been widely tipped to displace Arsenal in the Big Four. The chances of that happening were deemed to have increased when Jol bought Gareth Bale then Darren Bent while Arsenal were selling Thierry Henry. The fact that Bent cost Spurs half a million more than Barcelona had to pay for Henry, arguably Europe's best striker between 2002 and 2006, was indicative of both the premium placed on youth and the inflated prices English clubs charge each other. Patriots may fret that Premiership clubs are too eager to shop abroad, but it is more cost-effective in terms of what you can get per million pounds.
Whether or not it is the 'best' league in the world (what criteria should be used to judge?) the Premier League is certainly the place to which world-class stars are increasingly attracted. Liverpool succeeded in luring Fernando Torres to Anfield in one of the summer's biggest deals. Some critics questioned whether the Atletico Madrid striker was worth a £21.5 million gamble, saying he was not a 20-goals-a-season man. Torres has answered those critics to date with confidence-boosting early goals and some intelligent link-up play. He looks the business, and Rafael Benitez also looks to have invested wisely in Ryan Babel and Yossi Benayoun. The signs are promising with regard to Lucas Leiva and Sebastian Leto, while Andriy Voronin, who arrived on a free, has also settled in quickly.
Winning the Premier League title has become Liverpool's quest for the holy grail, and with their stronger and better balanced squad they have started the season impressively, suggesting both by results and performances that this will be their most serious challenge since they were last crowned English champions in 1990. Benitez also wanted Gabriel Heinze on board, but was thwarted in that ambition by Manchester United's refusal to let the Argentine defender move to Anfield. If that drawn-out affair was small-minded pandering to the Old Trafford gallery, United were certainly thinking big when it came to their own acquisitions.
They stole a march on all their rivals by tying up the transfers of Nani and Anderson from Portugal very early in the close season. Nani, from Sporting Lisbon, and the Brazilian Anderson from Porto are two exciting young talents whose performances in the Portuguese League were regularly electrifying. They are seen as they long-term replacements for the likes of Ryan Giggs and Paul Scholes, and if they have the same sort of impact in England as Cristiano Ronaldo has had, United fans are on a promise of good things to come. By the time they arrived, the deal to take Owen Hargreaves to Old Trafford had long been agreed. He should offer United solid ball-winning and accurate distribution skills from the key holding midfield role.
There are one or two lengthy transfer sagas every summer, and this time it was United's other main signing, Carlos Tevez, whose messy and complex move from West Ham via MSI to Manchester United seemed to crawl its weary way across the back pages throughout most of what passed for summer in England. The details have been well documented but suffice to say that United, despite their rocky start to the season, have got another class act in their ranks - as all West Ham fans know.
Another class act involved in a drawn-out sago was Henry, whose Emirates exit was seen by many as the straw that would break Arsenal's back. But Arsene Wenger is too astute to allow that to happen, and away from the spotlight he made a couple of low-profile purchases that could yet enhance his reputation for seeing and developing the potential in uncut gems. Eduardo Da Silva and Bacary Sagna are already playing the Wenger way.
Among the most active buyers this summer were Sven-Goran Eriksson, Alan Curbishley, Roy Keane, Sam Allardyce, Steve Bruce and Lawrie Sanchez. Eriksson's business for Manchester City was conducted in a bewildering blur as soon as the prolonged saga of his appointment was finalised. The Swede quickly reminded us he was a successful and well-connected club manager before his liaison with the FA, and his cosmopolitan spending spree quickly had the likes of Elano, Vedran Corluka, Valeri Bojinov, Javier Garrido, Geovanni, Rolando Bianchi, Gelson Fernandes and Martin Petrov donning the sky blue shirt in a flurry of photo-opportunities. It all created a frisson of excitement around Eastlands, and the sense of a new dawn was further lifted as City racked up three wins out of three. The mood was dampened, however, when Bojinov suffered a serious knee ligament injury.
Even more blighted in that respect are West Ham. Curbishley saw Lucas Neill and Matthew Upson crocked immediately after joining the Hammers in January, and history repeated itself when summer signings Julien Faubert and Kieron Dyer sustained horrendous injuries before they'd got used to the journey to work. Curbishley clearly relishes a man-management challenge, bringing Dyer and Craig Bellamy into a squad that already boasts Lee Bowyer. The colony of ex-Newcastle men at Upton Park was further augmented by the arrivals of Scott Parker and Nolberto Solano.
Newcastle themselves took a bit of a gamble. Among the Fayes, Beyes and Jose Enriques, Allardyce brought in the mean and the moody in Joey Barton and Mark Viduka, but leavened the mix with the grit of Alan Smith and versatility of Geremi as the new Toon go in search of silver.
Two ex-team-mates in charge of newly-promoted sides, Keane and Bruce set about major squad overhauls for the stiffer challenge of the Premier League. Bruce may have opted for quantity ahead of quality (Olivier Kapo and Garry O'Connor excepted) at Birmingham, but he did provide the summer's most refreshing transfer moment when he sent Hassan Ghaly and his puerile pretensions packing back to Tottenham.
Keane bought a superb goalkeeper in Craig Gordon for big money, but the likes of Kenwyne Jones, Danny Higginbotham, Kieran Richardson, Michael Chopra, Greg Halford and Dickson Etuhu will need to work hard to banish doubts about their Premiership quality. They should all be hungry enough for Sunderland, though.
The Northern Ireland team are mostly alive and well and living in West London following Lawrie Sanchez's summer recruitment drive for Fulham. Sanchez persuaded Mohamed Al Fayed to spend more liberally than he was prepared to for Chris Coleman, and now Sanchez must deliver.
Harry Redknapp was typically busy for Portsmouth, with John Utaka, Sulley Muntari and Sylvain Distin the pick of his purchases. Papa Bouba Diop, Glen Johnson and David Nugent may take a little longer to impress. Gareth Southgate was less active at Middlesbrough but will hope that Mido continues as he’s begun and that Tuncay Sanli proves a hit in England.
Among the summer's other big deals, Mark Hughes looks to have snared a quality bargain for Blackburn with Roque Santa Cruz, and Everton will be improved by the addition of record signing Yakubu, Leighton Baines and Phil Jagielka. Chris Hutchings at Wigan is keen to prove he's his own man with a rash of squad additions, among which Jason Koumas and Antoine Sibierski could reap particular dividends.
There was an interesting mix of new arrivals at Villa Park including Moustapha Salifou, Curtis Davies, Nigel Reo-Coker, Marlon Harewood, Zat Knight and Scott Carson. Knight and Reo-Coker shone in Aston Villa's early defeat of Chelsea, who look to have strengthened solidly if not as spectacularly as usual with Claudio Pizarro and Florent Malouda the early eye-catchers.
Kenny Miller, Claude Davies and Rob Earnshaw are three reasonable purchases, but whether they and the other signings by Billy Davies will give Derby the buoyancy to float rather than sink remains to be seen.
Worryingly for their fans, neither Bolton nor Reading were active at the quality end of the market, and the early season table suggests that could have been an error.
Now the rumour mill has shut down for four months, and the managers must go with what they have. Who will prove to be the shrewdest acquisitions of the summer? Here's a possible top XI, by position:
Gordon, Sagna, Distin, Knight, Bale, Nani, Hargreaves, Elano, Malouda, Tevez, Torres.
