One of the biggest stories this summer has not been any one transfer in particular, but rather the endless drivel which we are spoon-fed by the national, local and electronic media.

It has become nauseating. The sound of the paper dropping through the letterbox every day, or the ping from your inbox as the latest RSS feed is received, brings with it only the slightest hope that maybe, just maybe, one of Cristiano Ronaldo, Garry Barry, Frank Lampard, Didier Drogba, Emmanuel Adebayor, Dimitar Berbatov or Robbie Keane (to name just a few) would actually pack their bags and join another club. Sadly, this moment of salvation never arrives.

It's easy to blame the media for this ridiculous state of affairs. After all, they are the ones who pass on the information to the wider public, fuelling this cycle of endless hot air, never once asking the tough questions and getting to the root of the nonsense.

Looking at matter from the other side, however, there are 10 national daily newspapers in the UK, and all of them are battling it out to increase their readership. Everyone knows that, much like sex, football sells. So they all jump on the bandwagon, fighting away to get the exclusive before everyone else copies and pastes it into their rag, and the cycle continues to spin.

But, however much you may want to believe that the journalist behind the story has simply written the first thing that enters their mind, more often than not the articles have quotes somewhere in the piece (granted, they are not always relevant to the hyped-up headline, nor are they recent utterances). Whether it’s the player, the player's agent, or one of the clubs involved, too often the subjects of the rumours are all too quick to make public their agenda, and they use the media to get their message out.

In this respect, all the parties take a share of the blame. Players intent of leaving their clubs have gone directly to the press to help orchestrate their transfers. Examples of this have been commonplace this summer, starting with Adebayor's bizarre press conferences during Euro 2008, through to Gareth Barry's unauthorised interview with the News of the World.

Agents also have been brazen enough to show their vested interest in whipping up the stories surrounding their "assets". Before the summer, most people in England would have been unfamiliar with the names  Jorge Mendes, Dennis Lachter or Wagner Ribeiro (and maybe, fortunately, you still are). But these "nasty, evil, pointless scum", to use the words of Crystal Palace chairman Simon Jordan, have been constantly talking up their players, with the blatant aim of stirring a bidding war between several clubs, hoping to inflate their pay-offs to the highest possible levels. Example in point, Ronaldinho's flirtation with Manchester City.

The clubs are also knee-deep in the muck, often far too eager to tell the press their thoughts and feelings, so that they can either make it clear that a player is for sale, but more often than not to try to unsettle someone else's player. Step forward Roman Calderon, Sir Alex Ferguson, Adriano Galliani and Rafa Benitez. Without doubt, "tapping-up" players is become more and more widespread, and expecting the media not to print these juicy, attention-grabbing articles is foolhardy.

While many fans cringe at this endless cycle of transfer rumours and gossip, responsibility for this criminal status quo also rests with the masses who swallow whole the football news on a daily basis. People considering themselves football fans today are a very different breed from those who loved the English game back in the '80s and early '90s. The minority of football fans these days are the people who actually own season tickets or manage to regularly go to games.

As Arsene Wenger recently commented: "Ninety per cent of people who love the Premier League have no access to the games." It’s the people in Asia, North America and the Middle East who now have such a dominant voice in shaping the type of football coverage and news of the Premier League. There is a new breed of football fan – the must-have-now, internet-loving football fan, and they love transfer gossip and people love to feed their hunger.

For as long as football fans want to talk about who the latest big-name signing to their club will be, so more wasteful column inches on highly speculative, almost fiction, will persist.