Romelu Lukaku to Manchester United. Alvaro Morata to Milan. Diego Costa back to Atletico Madrid. Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang or Sergio Aguero to Chelsea. Kylian Mbappe to Real Madrid. Neymar to Paris Saint-Germain. Alexis Sanchez to Manchester City. Only the first one has been confirmed. You could shuffle most of the rest of the clubs and players around and you might turn out to be correct. There’s a lot of talk each transfer season—that’s about all there is to do, is talk—but the bulk of it is explicitly and obliquely about the simplest thing in the world, which is that teams need goals, and there are only a handful of players kicking around who can deliver lots of them reliably.

Something like fourteen or fifteen clubs in the big five leagues in Europe (England, Spain, Italy, Germany, and France) head into a given season with domestic or Champions League title aspirations and there are never enough top-class goal-scorers for all of them to be satisfied with their respective front lines. And so every summer, they steal from each other and the clubs below them. Due to the sports revenue bubble we’re living through, the price of doing so leaps ever upwards, and the increases have been especially sharp in recent years. In 2011, Radamel Falcao, who was twenty-five at the time and had already established himself as the best striker in Portugal, and moved to Atletico Madrid for $46 million. Last summer, Gonzalo Higuain, after scoring thirty-eight goals for Napoli the previous season, was poached from by Juventus for $98 million. Alvaro Morata, who has played but rarely started for Juve and Real Madrid, is going to cost whoever lands him a figure in the neighborhood of $80 million.

It’s not as if the discourse during the soccer season is rich and prismatic—there is always someone bellowing something simple, and someone else counter-bellowing something just about as dumb—but that chatter is at least about bodies in motion rather than numbers on a spreadsheet. The grumbling this time of year goes like this:

Camp A: These prices are outrageous!

Camp B: But that’s what the market will bear!

Camp A: The market is drunk!

Camp B: The market is the market!

There’s a weariness to this back-and-forth; it resembles muscle tissue firing amid a deep sleep. Neither side is truly committed to their position, and most of the time they’re arguing about Monopoly money anyway. United and Madrid and Chelsea are so flush that they can pay whatever they need to for a star player. The same is only slightly less true for Barcelona and Bayern Munich. Milan have become wealthy again after a lean spell. Monaco are run like they’re upper-middle class, but they have a billionaire owner who could spend huge he wanted to. The story is the same as it’s ever been, though the numbers are obscene now: Europe’s historical titans own most of the world’s best players, a few capable large-but-not-massive clubs give them some trouble, and your Celta Vigos and Sampdorias and Mainzes are feeding on scraps and trying to qualify for the Europa League.

This isn’t to say the summer transfer window doesn’t have intrigue and charm—the Vitolo to Atleti move was fraught and twisty; no one saw Leonardo Bonucci to Milan happening until the deal was suddenly imminent; Morata recently had to shave his hair, which he had died red in anticipation of a switch to United that fell through—but the internet and most of us having powerful computers in our pockets has created a reality in which we’re always seeking to know things before they happen, always gnawing at the gristle of every development, and there is simply much less actual stuff happening in the soccer world during summers that don’t contain World Cups or continental championships. So we’re dulling our teeth against bone. Hell, European tabloid journalists are coping with the lack of news by blithely making stuff up. Google basically any big player and any big club and you can find a rumor linking the two.

The effect of all this is an unpleasant state of hunger that makes the thwooping sound of your finger torpidly refreshing Twitter. It’s not good for us, and yet, if we want to use the part of our brain that likes to think about soccer, it’s all we have as far as fresh input.

Perhaps it’s instructive that so much of this absent thought is expended on goal-scorers. It’s glib to say the twenty-four hour news cycle is making us dumber, but it does seem to render us less apt to appreciate subtlety. Maybe you’re this way too: I find myself getting outraged at and upset with headlines these days. Not stories, but headlines. I read five words—REPUBLICAN HEALTHCARE BILL SLASHES MEDICAID—and my blood’s running hot before I even really have a solid basis for knowing why I’m mad. Some of the time, I read the piece beneath the twenty-three-point font and educate myself, but I can’t read everything, so I carry around a lot of eighth-baked notions about the world that I nonetheless have intense feelings about, at least until I begin to express them and realize I’m an underinformed idiot.

Goal-scorers are kind of like the headlines of soccer. They’re the most easily legible players in the sport. Their primary job is obvious and uncomplicated. They translate well to YouTube compilations. We measure their performance using metrics a six-year-old can understand. We can know which ones are great and which ones are just okay without even watching them play. The same isn’t true of a holding midfielder or a left back. We have to familiarize ourselves with the game’s minutiae to grasp the ability of players who occupy those positions. We have to do the reading, if you will.

And we do, eventually and happily. The beginning of the European soccer season isn’t a return to utopia, but as it nears, inter-fan kayfabe levels dwindle, the media stops pushing quite so much claptrap, transfer targets transform back into players, and we begin to engage with teams and strategy and competitions and honest-to-god games. Our fascinations deepen and our spirits become more generous, because we’re enjoying ourselves once again  It’s a hard rain ending an intellectual and emotional drought. In the meantime, here we are in the armpit of mid-July, shoutin’ and speculatin’ and sucking down aspartame fun. All that makes it endurable is that it ends, and that what follows is so blessedly substantial and satisfying.