I’ve never loathed West Ham United quite as much as I should, for a Millwall supporter.

Geographic and demographic proximity, with an ancient contretemps over a dockers’ strike (in which my lot were the blacklegs, I believe) are the supposed causes of our mutual hatred. But I could never work up the requisite level of animus, not when there were those arriv-iste monkeys down the road at Selhurst Park, with their Sains-bury’s superstore, kit appropriated from Barcelona in a magnificently misplaced intimation of greatness.

Even so, the last week or two has undoubtedly gladdened the heart. Obviously one always hopes to see West Ham relegated – but the idea that they might cease altogether, disappearing beneath the waves like one of those volcanic Icelandic islands suddenly engulfed by global warming, has kept me hopping up and down in delight every morning. And that allusion seems to me apposite, on a number of levels.

Bjorgolfur, Son of Gudmund, lord of the mighty Icelandic economy and consumer of smoked puffin flesh etc, bought the Hammers for a knockdown £85m. Or at least it seemed a knockdown. Now it looks about as sensible a purchase as one of those broom cupboards in Kensington that estate agents were once able to flog to gullible Sloanes for a million quid.

It was never evident to the economists and City pundits – who, of course, have a vested interest in saying it ain’t so – but it was clear to everyone else that there were aspects of the economy based upon nothing more than boundless optimism, pyramid selling or downright lies.

House prices were the obvious example; those almost exponential rises in value, year on year, which excluded the poor from the market just seemed, somehow, wrong – and not simply morally so. They were contrary to the laws of physics, never mind the hastily made-up laws of economics. What goes up, and so on.

The Halifax once put out a press release stating that the rise in house prices had doubled the “value” of the British economy within 10 years. If you were an industry expert then you could see how this might be so but for the rest of us, abiding in blissful ignorance in the real world, the response was: how on earth can that be? It’s that word: value. Subjective, ephemeral and susceptible.

The second most obvious example is professional football. The money that has flowed into the Premier League from television rights in the past 10 years has been real enough, I suppose – although it always felt a precarious conceit. This was the decade in which football effectively demutualised; its historic relationship with the supporters – those who pay to watch live, in the flesh – diminished to almost nothing.

The bulk of the money now came from places beyond the steady and safe dependable pockets of local fans. And the economics suddenly became bizarre and inexplicable to the ordinary public – although not, of course, to the experts. The amount of money paid for players and the wages they received seemed outlandish, beyond all understanding – and, just like those property prices we all thought – too good to be true. Well yes, it is beginning to look like the rest of us were right about that.

And after demutualisation, the clubs became uncommonly attractive to all manner of chancers – foreign fraudsters, gangsters and despots, desert-bred royalty and even a few genuine hard-nosed businessmen who thought that thismustbe a way to make money, given the enormous revenues being raked in by the clubs and their often prime city-centre locations, ripe for redevelopment. And the Premier League behaved like the City of London and the building societies and the government behaved: it could not believe its luck, all this cash pouring down. And so it was – still is – laissez faire about everything.

Both Uefa, through its excellent boss Michel Platini and the Football Association, through Lord Triesman, have warned about the excess debt being carried by Premier League clubs. But the Premier League itself is blasé. “Oh, don’t worry yourself about that. There’s nothing wrong with debt per se – it’s just this new thing, the stuff we’ve heard about on the news – toxic debt, yep, that’s it – that’s a problem. And we don’t have any of that, ha ha!”

The problem is, nobody was calling the debts of the Brad-ford & Bingley, or Fannie Mae, “toxic” a year or so ago. That’s a recent coinage, something dreamt up in the past few months to explain away something many of us had feared for some time. England’s clubs are in debt to the tune of a magnificent – or toxic, take your pick – £3bn.

Chelsea are dependent upon the continued viability of its Russian chairman, who has reportedly lost “billions” in the past few weeks. Manchester United are even worse off, a venerable club living off vast sacks of borrowed money and, presumably, borrowed time.

At West Ham, Bjorgolfur, Son of Gudmund, is looking to sell, Liverpool’s Hicks and Gillett are having to consider refinancing their debt (how easy will that be?) and at the tragically hilarious Newcastle United, Mike Ashley is also looking for a buyer. He is a much poorer man, on paper, than he was six months ago. Spiritually, one suspects, as well as financially. And neither Ashley nor Gudmundsson will get for his respective club anything like what he paid. Hell, give it a few weeks and you might be able to pick up both for the cost of a three-bedroomed semi in Wallsend.

There was the whiff of this last season as lower-division clubs narrowly escaped financial ruin, their ambition to compete at the highest level un d one by the fabulous amounts of money needed to do so. We said then everything was not all right with the world – and despite the Premier League’s insistence to the contrary, it is even less so today.