IN SIMPLER times, Kop Holdings might have referred to dubious practices outside The Grafton on a Friday night (as in “come on darlin’, cop hold of this...”).

But in these days when football and high-finance are as inseparable as Channel Five and bad programming, the object of scrutiny is more likely to be a set of accounts from a company of that name than a less-than-savoury member of the opposite sex.

The publication of the consolidated figures of Messrs Hicks and Gillett’s holding company, which encompasses the fortunes of the commercial entity we know as LFC, brought with it predictable howls of anguish and outrage as the full extent of the loans heaped on the club through the ‘leveraged’ acquisition became clear.

Quite how somebody can buy something on the never-never, then transfer the debt to the thing they’ve bought is beyond me, but I’m assured it’s perfectly legal and common practice in the world of big business.

And like it or not, that’s what football at the very top has become now; and increasingly, to paraphrase Graham Taylor, I like it not.

The clamour for investment and big-name signings is increasingly becoming the modern-day playground taunt: for ‘my Dad’s bigger than your dad’, substitute ‘my Arab sheikh is richer than your Russian oligarch’.

As fans pillory the few remaining chairmen who have only a few million to spare (pause here for an embarrassed blush from our friends across the Park), demanding that they cough up or ship out, I can’t help but wonder if this is all getting a bit out-of-hand.

Many of you will have reached this epiphany several years ago; for me, perhaps it’s taken the sharp contrast between the money being bandied about at the top level of football and the recession the rest of us are observing to highlight the insanity of the finances of the football world.