Wednesday is one of the biggest days of the football season. No, not the opening day, not the third round of the FA Cup, not even the Championship play-off final.

It’s the day after Jim White gets his yellow tie out and if you have it on all day Sky Sports News drives you crazy with news of some bloke you’ve never heard of signing for Sunderland on a continuous loop.

It’s the day when sanity finally returns to football.

Managers know they have or haven’t held on to their best player, fans can stop dreaming about signing that elusive 20-goal a season striker and pray instead that someone comes in from the youth team to replace that useless lump up front.

It is one of the farces of the modern game that speculation is allowed to drift on almost a month into the season rather than the slamming shut (it does have to slam shut doesn’t it?) before the proper stuff gets under way.

And, as Neal Ardley has found at AFC Wimbledon, getting players to buy into the culture of a football club is difficult enough at any time.

“One or two need to get used to me and my demands,” he said. “They need to learn quick or they won’t be in the team.”

If that is the case with summer signings who should have got to know the workings of a club during pre-season, what chance for the panic buy on transfer deadline day as they get thrust into a demanding schedule without so much as knowing their team-mates’ names?

Increasingly, August has become about posturing, and the changeover in personnel means early-season pacesetting counts for precious little as the season wears on.

Last season Nottingham Forest, Peterborough and Morecambe led the three Football League tables at the end of August. Each of them ended up floundering in mid-table obscurity.

The real season starts next Wednesday.

And if all that sanity feels a bit too much for you, never fear, it’s only a week until another nonsense, the loan window, opens for business.