Times are hard, we are told. Even in the supposedly inflation-free world of football. Liverpool is for sale, Manchester United has huge debts, Portsmouth hover close to bankruptcy. But none of this seems to apply to Manchester City. This is a club that has just signed Yaya Touré on a wage of, it is said, £221,000 a week. I'll just repeat that. 221,000. Pounds. A. Week. Or £11m in wages every year. Clearly this is not enough for Touré, because there is more.

Much more. He apparently gets £823,000 as a bonus if Manchester City qualify for the Champions League, and £412,000 if they win it, plus £1.65m annually for his "image rights". Oh, and City also paid Barcelona £24m.

Now, Touré is quite a good player. Not bad. He is 27-years-old and he has played 94 times for Barcelona in three seasons, scoring a grand total of four goals in that time. Last season he was not even a first-team regular. He only started 13 games for the Catalan club. Before that, he played, for a bit, for some other clubs – not great clubs, minor clubs. But he is now, officially, the highest-paid player in the Premier League.

During the global financial crisis, quite rightly, a lot of people got very angry about the amount of money earned by bankers. There was a moral outcry. People were up in arms. The government threatened to step in. But it seems that football lives in a kind of alternative world, cut off from the realities of society, cuts in public services, banking meltdown and belt-tightening.

In football, the sky is the limit. When Bryan Robson became the first £1,000-a-week footballer in 1981, there was outrage in the land. I remember fans singing "what a waste of money" at Robson during games. Now, nobody even notices.

There are two possible reactions to the news of Touré's contract. One is simply to shrug your shoulders and say: "That's how the market works." The other is disbelief. An average player on £221,000 a week! Football has clearly gone mad, and nobody is doing anything to stop this madness.

Football has no wage cap, unlike the wealthiest sports in the US. Clubs can pay what they like, buy who they like, sell who they like. In Italy they have a name for this. Financial doping. But Touré's wages also pose a moral dilemma for all of us. How can such excess ever be justified in the name of football? Should we not feel ashamed to even watch football next season, as schools and hospitals close down and students are denied university places?

Yet there is very little we can do about this madness. Even if every fan in the UK were to tear up their season tickets, or stop watching Sky, it wouldn't make any difference to Manchester City's finances, which are totally unconnected with the sport, or its supporters. Football is a global phenomenon, where the game itself counts for little or nothing. The Premier League's bloated stars have almost all been flops at the World Cup, but their wages will remain at their current, absurd levels. Football, as it once was, is dead, but the show goes on, and on.