Six days to go. The transfer deadline - moved to midnight Monday from the usual 31 August so it finishes on a business day - is rushing towards those desperate to buy and creeping agonisingly closer to those anxious not to sell.
The system has its critics and, in an era when most innovations have introduced greater freedom to operate, it is something of an anomaly. Yet next Tuesday morning everyone will know where they stand for the next four months and people who freely signed contracts to play football for large sums of money will have to get on with doing so, or rot.
There are such things as coercive contracts and outrageous clauses - famously, though perhaps apocryphally, as a child star Judy Garland would have been in breach of her terms had she died without giving 24 hours' notice. Some young footballers - especially those trafficked around from the Third World - are the victims of unscrupulous agents and clubs. But none of that applies to seasoned stars such as Gareth Barry and Dimitar Berbatov.
Conventional wisdom holds that players who sulk should get their way and clubs have to relent because an unhappy asset is a devalued one: £30m in the bank is worth more than a superstar in the stiffs. But the term "conventional wisdom" was coined to describe thinking that attempted to justify the status quo rather than explain or challenge it.
A colleague of mine has just quit her job. She is leaving one newspaper to work for another, a direct rival. But for the next three months she will be working for us still, because that's what he contract says and she is a professional. Sometimes people in such positions are sent on "gardening leave", but if not then they carry on working. A touch demob-happy, maybe, but doing their duty nonetheless.
Footballers' contracts are longer. But they are far better paid. When things go wrong - injury, loss of form, financial implosion - players expect clubs to honour their contracts. And they do. If players want to be considered professionals then they must do the same and if Barry and Berbatov are still at their current clubs next Tuesday morning then they should act like the rest of us have to.
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A Mr Donald Duck wonders in Mailbox just what we have against the Daily Mail. It's hard to know where to begin or where to end, but Jeff Powell's column last Monday is as good a place as any to do both.
Powell wrote: "It was bad enough that one British boxer failed to make the weight in Beijing, then that another expressed relief at being eliminated because he was homesick. Most embarrassing of all, however, is that so many losers in this overhyped team are blaming the judges and the scoring system for their defeats.
"Time to bring them all home?"
By Wednesday, our failing pugilists had guaranteed three bronzes, a haul last achieved in the 1972 Games in Munich. When James DeGale won his semi and final, the boxers Powell wondered about calling home en masse had their best set of medals for more than half a century.
We all make incorrect predictions. But there is a morose delight in doom-mongering that Powell typifies and in which the Mail excels on all its pages. So we hate them.
Will that do, Donald?
Philip Cornwall