Ian Bell, columnist of the year

What's the attribute most of us possess that most of us want to see the back of in a bleak 2009? I am thinking, of course, of debt, scary enough at the best of times, but terrifying when a mere 20 sporting enterprises collectively owe £1.6 billion. Try remortgaging that lot.

Such is the weight pressing, nevertheless, on England's Premier League. If it sounded insane a year ago, it approaches demented now. Yet while everyone else is talking of the credit crunch, of recession and depression, football is in denial. No-one, it appears, has thought it through.

No two clubs are the same, of course, but you can feel how the chill winds blow. Alex Ferguson, for example, has acquired a couple of young Serbs and announced, grandly, that his January business is concluded. Manchester United scarcely require fresh talent, but imagine the relief among the Glazer family. Old Trafford sits on a mountain of debt. It's the stuff you pay for nasally.

West Ham are on the block, meanwhile. If there are no takers by March, reportedly, their owner, Bjorgolfur Gudmundsson, faces being declared insolvent. Mr Gudmundsson labours under twin misfortunes: he is Icelandic and was a major shareholder in Landsbanki, a financial institution that failed spectacularly.

He would like to be offered £250 million for the Hammers. Who wouldn't? But analysts suggest he should count himself lucky if he gets half. Two things characterise a financial crisis, after all: there are few buyers and those who remain are interested only in bargains.

That rule applies, in reverse as it were, to Newcastle and Liverpool. Both were supposed to be heading to market; neither is now for sale. Prices for prestige sports investment vehicles have collapsed.

As has the edifice once known as "Chelsea's billions". No-one suggests that Roman Abramovich is in real financial difficulty, but his investments have not exactly prospered lately. Hence the tales of cost-cutting measures at this of all clubs. Some wags have even suggested that players will henceforth be charged for snacks, or told to pack their own pieces in the back of the baby Bentleys.

More seriously, Luiz Felipe Scolari lacks the cheque book with which Jose Mourinho dazzled Europe. January purchases will be financed, we are assured, by sales (and there goes Wayne Bridge). Indeed, if Big Phil wins neither the league title nor the European Cup he himself could begin to seem expensive come the summer.

It goes on. The January market is, for one thing, liable to seem a little quiet this year. Thanks to sterling's slide against the euro, England's clubs can no longer treat Europe as a pick n' mix store. Conversely, the big European outfits suddenly have the edge. If they are not already financial basket cases - Valencia, say - they can now enjoy a 25% currency advantage, and more, over English rivals.

Agents will already be on the case. Get X to Madrid or Milan, they will say. Make sure he is paid in euros. Then sit back and enjoy the Magical Expanding Percentage.

This doesn't mean, of course, that England's biggest clubs will cease to bid for the very best. It does mean that the sums have changed, that imports of middling talent will make far less economic sense. Complaints over "foreign mercenaries" will be muted, I think, for a while.

Debt will be the topic instead. No club is, to my knowledge, at serious risk, but some must be seriously worried. And if England sneezes, what sort of cold can the Scottish game, perenn-ially strapped, expect? Hearts, to take one example, have impressive levels of debt and an owner in the banking bus-iness. So how many players are supposedly for sale this month? I've lost count.

There are, in any case, deeper aspects to this crisis among mere mortals. Unemployment is a blight on society that renders football's problems trivial. But what follows if, as predicted, unemployment hits three million? How many season tickets might that affect? How many Sky and Setanta subscriptions? And how many advertisers will flock to ITV's expensively-acquired FA Cup coverage?

The smarter clubs are already cutting prices. After all, even for people who hang on to their jobs the season ticket or the Sky package is liable to seem like discretionary spending before long. Football will not feel the pain instantly, but the pain will come. We may all need entertainment in hard times, but the game has been greedy for too long. And frugality, especially if enforced, is the answer to greed.

Not a bad thing, you might say, and you might be right. Even as an experiment, a period with fewer vastly expensive but unimpressive foreign players - the Berbatov Effect - might be interesting. Meantime a little humility from some of our own, and a less ostentatious display of wealth, would not go amiss.

The 1970s, for those who can remember, was a tough decade for ordinary people. The football was pretty good, though. Might there have been a connection? The economics of the modern game was meanwhile baffling, not to say bonkers, even before the credit crunch. It was, said the analysts, "unsustainable". What's the prognosis now?

In years gone by the banks were indulgent towards football. Sometimes they were conscious of "community"

- who would enrage customers by shutting the local club? - and sometimes of cash. Football's great virtue was real money flowing, week in and week out, through the turnstiles. It also had a knack, first, of luring rich idiots who fancied being owners, and of producing talented kids worth improbable amounts.

Try talking to a friendly bank this January. Bankers won't even lend to one another. In England's case the real reckoning will come if it once appears, even for an instant, that the TV revenue streams are in danger of drying up. So ask Sky about "churn", and ask ITV about advertising projections.

Then ask the average club chief executive to quote the exchange rate against the euro. It will be carved on what passes for his heart.