PREMIER LEAGUE:Overrated players can expect to capitalise once again in the panic buying of  the imminent transfer window, writes Andrew Fifield

IS THE recession actually happening? We might all be braced for that dark day we are forced to burn elderly relatives due to the lack of affordable fuel, but in the world unpopulated by business analysts and financial advisers - you know, the ones who told you to invest that lump of grandma's inheritance in Landsbanki - life appears to be trundling on much the same.

Sales of organically-reared, hand-fed, pert-buttocked turkeys are up; in the Oxford Street sales, shoppers are indulging in their traditional bouts of fisticuffs in a bid to secure the best bargains; and, in football, supposedly cash-strapped club owners are so eager to fritter away their hard-earned cash that they are attempting to jemmy open the transfer window in the hope of heading off their rivals.

One high-profile deal - Lassana Diarra's move to Real Madrid - has already been completed while Craig Bellamy is waiting patiently on West Ham's front porch while Tottenham and Manchester City argue over who gets to take him home.

Then again, the Premier League has always abided by its own peculiarly warped set of fiscal rules. The rest of the world might have learnt the hard way that a market driven solely by empty-headed speculation and giddy optimism can only inflate so much before blowing up and taking half its traders with it, but top-flight football prefers to just keep on puffing.

Reason has never been a prominent player in the transfer market and, now that all of football's business is shoe-horned into three chaotic months of the year, deals are motivated primarily by panic.

The winners in all this are, of course, the players and - more pointedly - their agents. In a market flooded by fear, it becomes relatively easy to convince fretful managers and chief executives that their services are indispensable and that they would be bloody fools not to pay them €84,000-a-week to dig them out of relegation trouble/mount a late charge for a European place/rekindle their title challenge (delete as applicable).

Just now, at least, nobody does it better than Diarra.

The man is extraordinary, one of sport's genuine modern phenomena in the sense that his value appears to increase in indirect proportion to the amount of time he spends on a football pitch. Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure I have made more Premier League appearances in the last three years than Lassana Diarra and I don't see Ramon Calderon beating a path to my front door, laden with untold riches and with drool hanging off his chin.

For the record, Diarra has made 35 league starts since August 2005 and has scored one league goal. He is supposed to be the new Claude Makelele, but at Chelsea he proved unable to displace either the old Claude Makelele or the other new Claude Makelele, John Mikel Obi. So he left.

At Arsenal, he was hailed as the midfield rottweiler Arsene Wenger could deploy alongside his fluffy poodles, but four months of carrying drinks for Mathieu Flamini and Gilberto Silva proved just too much to bear. Apparently he made 13 appearances but I've yet to meet anyone who saw any of them. I suspect the stats man at Arsenal simply heard the name "Diaby" announced as a substitute and scribbled accordingly.

And so to Portsmouth, where he immediately endeared himself to the locals at his inaugural press conference by announcing he would be off as soon as a proper club came in for him.

But then he did win the FA Cup and obviously his domineering performances against the combined might of Preston, Plymouth, West Bromwich Albion and, in the final, Cardiff City was enough to convince Calderon, whose record in the transfer market makes Roy Keane look canny.

Maybe I'm living in the past. Perhaps in these febrile financial times, you no longer have to play football to be considered an enticing transfer window prospect: you just have to be available. And Diarra is definitely that: I've had Christmas lunches which have lingered longer than the midfielder, who is about to make Real his fourth club since August 2007.

The Frenchman's problem, of course, is that at some point he will have to prove that there is a man behind the myth and deliver the kind of performances that befit a footballer who currently costs his employers around €420,000-a-game in transfer fees.

Maybe he will do just that at the Bernabeu; maybe he won't. Either way, come August, another queue of suitors will doubtless have formed outside Calderon's office, all sweaty brows and open chequebooks.

For what it's worth, my money's on Manchester City.