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For all the astonishment over the eye-watering fees in yet another record-setting Premier League transfer window, some club executives were even more taken aback by the way a number of those deals were put together.

They were not impressed. They were alarmed, and deeply uneasy.

Several have discussed proposals in which the buying club would pay nothing at all this season, while settling the transfer through instalments over the coming years. The selling clubs, naturally, could still record the transaction at the full value immediately.

It is only one example of how the Premier League is pushing a growing share of real payments into the future. According to multiple sources, the roughly £3.5bn spent in this window has been underpinned by more debt than ever before.

If the usual debate now is about who “won the window”, there is an obvious answer: the credit firms bankrolling these transactions.

And that has many people worried.

On one side, there is persistent discussion about liquidity being a major issue in English football. The Independent Football Regulator is currently preparing its landmark “State of the Game” report, and the expectation is that it will highlight precisely this problem. There is a shortage of liquidity throughout the sport.

The other side of it is that this is happening at a time when private credit itself is facing increasing strain, from concerns over an AI bubble to the highly troubling rise in global bond yields. The latter shaped deadline-day headlines that were probably far more relevant to football than many of the transfers that were completed.

“A credit challenge is coming,” one club figure says. “The game should be worried.”

Enzo Fernandez was the biggest signing in a summer in which more than £3.5bn was spent in the Premier League.

That is why the reaction is not limited to shock at “crazy prices” where “value has gone out the window” — pun unintended by the many using the phrase — but also extends to the behaviour of the market itself.

Put another way, this may ultimately prove to be exactly the wrong transfer market in which to act so aggressively.

The unexpectedly old-school character of much of the “slapdash” business by clubs that ought to know better is viewed by many insiders as a sign of a broader irrationality.

Beyond calling it “utter madness” and a “market out of control”, as one source put it, experienced executives are also likening it to the sub-prime mortgage crisis. There is even a parallel in conservative funds such as insurance and pensions being used to invest in a volatile sector like football.

So yes, “The Big Short”, and perhaps a genuine football version of it. It may likewise take time, but the risks are visible already.

Many people may find this puzzling given how cash-rich the Premier League appears. There is the perceived ability to meet those transfer fees and wages, long associated with the billions generated by international broadcasting deals, while English clubs continue to dominate Deloitte’s Football Money List.

And that is the greater irrationality. As has long been argued in these pages, football’s vast global appeal should make it entirely self-sustaining, especially in England.

And yet that is exactly what is now under threat.

Bradley Barcola is another nine-figure signing for Liverpool.

As so often, instead of remaining self-sufficient, the game has unnecessarily allowed itself to be shaped by larger forces, once again taking on its familiar canary-in-the-coalmine role in reflecting wider society.

The influence of “institutional money”, particularly from the United States, has expanded enormously over the last seven years, especially within the Premier League.

Last week’s Inside Football newsletter even suggested that we may be entering “late-stage Premier League”, mirroring the idea of “late-stage capitalism”.

The rise of these investors has also brought entirely new practices into the sport, many of which run against football’s traditional norms.

You can see it in moves as significant as selling women’s teams to related companies, or as basic as carrying out transfer business with direct rivals.

Many executives believe this has been further intensified — and arguably even driven — by the Premier League’s Squad Cost Ratio rules. The constant circulation of money through transfers allows clubs to comply with the regulations even as debt keeps rising.

A striking article by sports business figure and former SPL chief Roger Mitchell is currently being widely shared among football executives, in which he discusses “how clubs deeply in loss and debt can still spend hundreds of millions for one player”.

Alejandro Garnacho was involved in several deals between Aston Villa and Chelsea, with some payments pushed back.

This transfer window has only deepened the feeling that clubs increasingly resemble “opaque pools of money”.

Directors within the Premier League complain that the competition has had years to work with Uefa on this issue, but that little progress has been made.

There is a widespread belief that while this very window has underlined the long-standing need for cost control, the regulations still do not have enough impact on genuine sustainability. As one chief executive puts it, “football needs constraints as found in the EFL and Formula 1”. Concern has now grown to the point that European Football Clubs, the influential lobbying group, are establishing a task force.

The level of concern is that high.

Arguably, it should be even higher.

Global anxiety about the markets has prompted more investors — including investors on the scale of Jeff Bezos — to buy into football. The standard explanation is that sport is an asset class that does not move in line with broader market fluctuations, and that clubs, as “real brands” with a “scarcity value”, are an attractive place to put money.

As a result, valuations continue to rise.

Actual executives, however, warn against investing in these “scarce brands” if they continue swallowing cash through player recruitment and associated fees that are spiralling out of control. There is even an argument that the investments themselves have helped drive this transfer activity, on the assumption that there will always be another buyer further down the line.

Too many, it seems, are thinking only in the short term, creating a cycle that is spinning faster and faster.

Roberto De Zerbi has overseen Tottenham’s remarkable spending of more than £300m.

All this talk of insulation also ignores what Mitchell describes as “asymmetric risks” from the market. And that market is now seeing a much wider debate around AI, and the extent of investment in software assets that may now be existentially threatened by AI, while heavy lending into an AI infrastructure boom continues.

A broader bubble may be forming.

Beyond even that, though, there is the most immediate development in all this: the cost of government debt is rising across the West.

Look at some of today’s headlines, as Sky News points out that “the single most important barometer in the global economy is going in the wrong direction”.

If a market correction comes, credit lines will change and clubs relying on this uninterrupted flow of money will suddenly face a very different environment.

The bubble will have burst. The debts will be called in. And, typically, it will be clubs lower down the pyramid that feel the wider consequences most acutely.

Football, as ever, is only a tangential subplot within all of that, and part of the same broader story.

Brentford signed Mamadou Sangare for more than £40m after the Mali star made Ligue 1’s team of the season.

As one source warns, the warning signs are already visible in what happened with 777, which failed to buy Everton last year. Restraint in this window may yet prove to have been a virtue.

The central point, perhaps, is that the transfer market is significantly exposed to shifts in the credit market, and there is serious doubt over whether clubs are planning properly for that reality.

“And yet the bubble keeps going, fuelled by greed,” one source warns.

Another senior source is even more fatalistic: “This will all come crashing down. And when it does…”