As well as this summer being remembered for the transfer window in which just about every Premier League club tried to break their own spending record, there is a good chance it will eventually be remembered for something else. To wit: the summer when no one apart from Real Madrid knew whether they had broken a transfer record or not.
Take the case of Manchester United’s Romelu Lukaku, the £90m man, as the back pages have it. When Everton sold him the price was stated at £75m plus add-ons, which might have more or less guaranteed an ultimate spend of £90m but conveniently left Paul Pogba, the previous year’s big-money signing, as the most expensive player in United’s history. So which is it to be?
Presumably there were add-ons in the Pogba transfer as well, though the widely quoted tag was £89m. So do we count add-ons or do we not?
Which of Manchester City’s new full-backs is now the most expensive defender in the game, for instance? Originally it was only the add-ons that took Kyle Walker’s fee past the £50m paid by Paris Saint-Germain for David Luiz, and it remains unclear how exactly Benjamin Mendy’s quoted £52m is comprised.
To a large extent it doesn’t really matter. They are all stupefying amounts of money and the peripheral details are of little consequence once the player changes clubs, but football has always been a traditional sort of game and its followers feel happy knowing things like who is the most expensive player around or at what point a certain long-standing record was surpassed.
It’s a bit like the pop charts. Anyone of a certain age will remember the summer or the Christmas when this or that was No1; it is not exactly important information but it was nice to know that someone, somewhere was keeping a record of these things and that accurate charts dating back to the 50s could be produced if necessary. The pop charts went a bit weird with the advent of downloads, and though it is on the whole unlikely that Ed Sheeran is going to find himself occupying nine of the top 10 positions, something similar seems to be happening to football transfer fees in the era of add-ons and image rights.
Be that as it may, the time will shortly arrive for clubs and kit sponsors to stop showing off how well they understand new marketing opportunities and for the players themselves to demonstrate they are worth all the investment and attention.
There would be sympathy here for the view that no individual can possibly be worth £50m, let alone £90m, and that football finances and the real world of real work parted company a long time ago, though since similar fears have been voiced just about every year since Alan Ball changed hands for £112,000 in 1966 there seems little point in adding to an annual chorus.
Football clubs generally do not pay out what they cannot afford. It is what your modern, foreign-owned Premier League unit is easily able to afford these days that makes you wonder where the game will end up.
Consider the spending patterns for a moment. United’s outlay on Lukaku, whether it sets a club record or not, is being made to look quite conservative and traditional by what is going on around them. While it is still possible United will swoop for Renato Sanches or conclude a deal for Eric Dier or Nemanja Matic, so far Everton have managed to outspend them this summer, assuming they are willing to cough up the full £50m for Swansea’s Gylfi Sigurdsson.
In the old days – that is, four or five years ago – a club spending around £150m in a single summer would have been assumed to be trying to get ahead, to lift themselves into the Champions League bracket as Chelsea and Manchester City did in the past. Except that for Everton there are no guarantees of a swift move upwards into the top four. Manchester City, one of the clubs intent on staying there, have just dwarfed Everton’s outlay on a new set of full-backs. Chelsea have just spent around £130m on Álvaro Morata, Tiemoué Bakayoko and Antonio Rüdiger, and their coach is talking about three or four more top-line signings before August is out. And Chelsea happen to be the defending champions.
Normally the accepted wisdom about new signings is that it is unwise to change too much of the team all at once, in which case José Mourinho would appear to be on the right track with just an adjustment at centre-half and centre-forward.
Or possibly Mauricio Pochettino, who has not made any adjustments at all but still has essentially the same Spurs team that performed so well last season, with the exception of Kieran Trippier moving up to replace Walker. Yet if Pep Guardiola has righted most of the major wrongs of last season, with a new goalkeeper and a tighter but more adventurous back line, should City not be the ones to watch?
It is fairly pointless making any predictions at this stage for – ludicrously – the transfer window still has more than a month to run. Every year we hear pleas for the window to close before the games actually start, and while international tournaments sometimes get in the way of business, empty summers such as this one could easily be structured to give clubs time to do all the necessary trading before a ball is kicked.
Arsenal could still lose Alexis Sánchez before the end of August and as Arsène Wenger has admitted, that would damage their chances of regaining their Champions League status. Liverpool are in a similar sort of limbo, insisting they will never sell Philippe Coutinho but choosing not to listen when Leipzig or Southampton say the same sort of thing about Naby Keita and Virgil van Dijk. Except we all suspect that Van Dijk and Sánchez, in particular, will end up moving. They were the most coveted players when the window opened and they remain so now, with just the pricing, positioning and horse-trading still to come. Should both players end up at the same club, and only City or Chelsea could finance that sort of splash, it would not only trump everything that has taken place in the window so far, it would in all probability have the same effect on Premier League opponents once the season starts.
It might not happen, but there is plenty of time and plenty of money to make what has taken place so far look like polite preliminaries. It is not without significance that the real prize of the summer, Kylian Mbappé, looks like ending up at Real Madrid for the sort of fee that would roughly double the existing transfer record (whatever that might be) but the English response to missing out on absolute top quality is usually to ramp up the spending on players from the next tier.
Despite the warnings of Spurs chairman Daniel Levy, who has just branded the level of English spending unsustainable, Tottenham are likely to prove the exception rather than the rule. The six clubs around them have not put away the chequebooks yet, in fact the biggest surprises may be still to come.