Who do you think Craig Bellamy will punch first at Upton Park? It’s going to end in tears one way or another, isn’t it? Hammers fans should maybe look on the bright side. Usually in the close season your team buys a foreigner, some strange-looking cove from Sporting Plutonium of Minsk or Dinamo AntiSemite of Croatia and you think well, hey, who knows, maybe he’ll be good for us, the gaffer obviously saw something in him.

Not realising that neither the gaffer nor any of his subordinates has ever seen him play – he was recommended by a hoax phone call from a rival fan pretending to be David Beckham or at 2am in a Chelsea nightclub by a Russian chap in sunglasses who set off the Geiger counters at Heathrow. But you give him the benefit of the doubt until September 25, when you sadly conclude that he’s absolutely useless and – as he stamps off down the tunnel sticking a finger up to the crowd – thoroughly obnoxious to boot. Now you have to offload him but everyone has seen him play and the trouble is he’s on a contract that expires in June 2012.

The great thing about Bellamy, assuming the move from Liverpool goes through, is that you can spare yourself all the angst and false optimism and hate him right this second. Especially if he’s being paid more money in a season than every other West Ham player in history added together and then multiplied by five. Maybe it was a hidden stipulation from the FA at the end of all the Tevez shenanigans – okay, we won’t dock you any points, but you have to buy Bellamy, and pay through the nose for it.

He may not be the worst buy this summer, mind. In order to replace that likeable and loyal workhorse Mark Viduka, Middlesbrough invested two million quid in Jeremie Aliadiere who, because he is French and played for Arsène Wenger’s Arsenal, has long been considered the most promising player in the entire history of the world. You suspect that he will be 42 before that description is amended. Most strikers have their worth measured in goals per game; Aliadiere still doesn’t make a whole number in goals per season. In point of fact he’s scored a total of three league goals in the past six seasons. Most of them were quite good, though – so that’s something to look forward to at the Riverside on a dank afternoon in November 2008. I have a horrible feeling Boro may go down, much as I want them to win the Premiership. But long before March their other big signing, the Turk Tuncay Sanli – who looks quite good – will have gone off in a huff about something.

Somewhere down the list of close-season transfers, all those Francophone Africans and cold-eyed eastern Europeans and quixotic south Americans, there will be lurking a mad Marc Boogers and a fraudulent Ali Dia (he really was signed, after a hoax telephone call, remember, by that fine judge of character and temperament Graeme Souness. How we laughed.) Or someone as spectacularly hopeless and fat as Tomas Brolin who, I’m delighted to say, proved so inept at Crystal Palace that they gave him a job as an interpreter for a bit, anything to stop him playing. Apparently he now sells vacuum cleaner parts, which is at least a useful occupation, if less entertaining.

Meanwhile, almost every foreigner bought by Newcastle United turns out to be hopeless or is not bad but can’t stand Newcastle, its people, its weather, its managers. So, this season they’ve wised up and invested in English players instead. I’m sure the Joey Barton deal will work out just fine.

Indeed, there is almost as much damage to be wrought by bringing in culturally inappropriate English players – something which, as a Millwall supporter, I well know. Nearly 20 years ago we spent about £800,000 on the languid and cunning striker Paul Goddard. We could hardly have been more culturally adrift if we’d bought Jean-Luc Godard. I still remember him standing in the middle of the opposition’s half looking forlorn and distrait as the long ball sailed 60ft over his head for the umpteenth time. Goddard did for us; we were relegated, perhaps never in our history to return.

The amount of money spent on transfer fees and then again on the wages of the players brought in may indeed be obscene and help to destroy the game as we know it, but it does provide a few laughs along the way. Especially now that players are bought on the slenderest of evidence, simply because the money is there and needs to be spent.

There is a feverish whiff to the transfer market this July, a fever induced not by a plethora of great players itching to turn out at the Reebok on a damp Monday evening, but by managers with too much money in their paws. Good luck, you Hammers.