Arsene Wenger has said that the fees being paid for footballers these days is ‘scary’ and ‘completely crazy’. Jurgen Klopp reiterated his ideals for building a team around coaching and development, rather than with blank cheques. But regardless of what they or anyone else says, there is a record transfer fee about to be broken by Manchester United for Paul Pogba.

But that’s only a drop in the ocean. Transfer fees are going up across the board and we now live in an era where Bournemouth, a club with a stadium that doesn’t even hold 12000 people, can spend £6m on Liverpool’s Australian reserve left back who only has five total Premier League appearances to his name.

The fact is that the money isn’t really what this is all about. There is money to spend in football. We love it, you’re reading about it right now, there’s a massive market that continues to fund all of this spending to the point where calling it excess would be stupid. It’s not excessive, the Premier League has a fairly even structure for distributing wealth and is entering some lucrative times with new telly deals kicking in, and those clubs aren’t spending money they don’t have. It isn’t reckless to spend £100m on one player when your club brings in roughly five times that each year.

What this is really about, is the battle for something a little scarcer, a little harder to define: attention. That’s the real goal.

Manchester United want to sign Paul Pogba in order to improve their team, sure. But they want to break the record transfer fee in order to make a statement of their own power and influence. So that people know they can. Do that and the fans will know that they’re serious, otherwise if this was strictly about building the strongest starting XI then they probably could have gotten a couple of guys of a similar ability for half the price each. Paul Pogba, though, he’s one of the most marketable players in the world. He’s also a player who happens to represent Adidas, who themselves pay a record fee to sponsor Manchester United’s jerseys.

That much is all obvious enough but, again, that’s only a fraction of what’s going on here. There are stories from the old days about Brian Clough deciding he wanted to sign a guy, travelling to their house with a contract that was drawn up that afternoon and staying all night until they sign the thing. Done and dusted. These days things are never that easy. Transfers drag on for weeks with massive fees being bartered back and forth, as conflicting sponsors are weighed up and commercial rights are discussed. Not to mention agent fees, amiright Mino Raiola?

So then you’ve got four distinct sides to each of these little dramas and while the player and agent tend to be on the same page, it’s all still a messy web of vested interests. We in the public, meanwhile, are left to feed on scraps and tactical bargains, ciphering through the clickbait and the red herrings to find something to cling to that might be real. Oh, and there is plenty of clickbait, don’t worry about that.

The modern online media isn’t so much about quality as it is about quantity. They get the same ad dollars whether you read an article or if you just click on it, look at the headline for three seconds and quit it, so what do they care? The aim of the game is to get you to click on the link. If they can keep you there to see a few more things and maybe click on an ad accidentally, then that’s great. That doesn’t happen without the initial click though.

It also doesn’t really matter if what they report is legit or not. Any publication would rather a reputation as truth-bringers but when writing about footy transfers, so much of it is only speculation that it’s irrelevant. By the time it’s proven that Arsenal weren’t actually trying to sign that Brazilian midfielder the story has already been buried for weeks beneath all manner of others. For the record, these are the major football papers/sites ranked in terms of transfer trustworthiness:

1. BBC
2. Guardian
3. Telegraph/Independent
4. The Times
5. Sky Sports/ESPN FC
6. The Sun/Daily Mail
7. Daily Mirror/Daily Express/Metro

Don’t bother with anything below #5 if you want to sound like you aren’t just a completely gullible moron. Curiously there’s an inverted version of that list that ranks the number of rumours they publish each day. Very curious. All of those football365’s and goal.com’s, etc. are secondary reporters, by the way. They pick up the stories once others have scooped them – which is actually a pretty decent filtering tool for the commoners without press credentials.

Unfortunately it doesn’t take much to set off the rumour mills in 2016. Some rumours are easy to dissect, such as the ones that come in the midst of contract negotiations at the player’s current team. Others exist because somebody misconstrues a quote or a hint. It’s important to consider the source of these stories when you read them and, more than anything, pay close attention to the quotes (if there are any) to see where any dots might have been joined that shouldn’t have.

A quick search brings this headline on The Sun’s website (don’t waste a google on it): “Everton boss Ronald Koeman wants to reunite with Jose Fonte but Manchester United are also interested”. Right, so Fonte is a very talented defender who has proven himself over a few years in the PL and just won the Euros with Portugal. His stock is high, he is contracted until 2018 on a deal signed last year. There are no quotes in the article though apparently Everton have offered £9m for his services. It gets weird when tales of actual bids are produced – where do these numbers even come from? Still, Koeman is the manager at Everton and was also the Southampton boss that extended Fonte’s deal in 2015, makes sense that he might want him especially with John Stones seeming likely to move to Manchester City.

Why are Manchester United involved? Who knows. Jose Mourinho is Portuguese, maybe that’s it. However Jose said in his introductory press conference weeks ago that he had four targets and any other transfer moves would be ‘supplementary’ and based on players sold. He’s already signed a centre-back in Eric Bailly and has continued to play Daley Blind there in pre-season. Given he is also rumoured (a more substantial rumour given some of his comments) to want to cut the MUFC first team squad by up to nine players, thoughts of him moving for a 32 year old CB probably rank somewhere between utter trash and complete garbage. But if there’s perceived to be competition for his signature then Southampton can push that price up, if you get the drift. A large part of the issue here is that whole tapping up thing where you can’t legally talk to a player or their agent without going through their club so things have to happen second hand and intermediaries, well, they talk.

A general rule of thumb is to believe nothing until you’ve heard it 100 times from at least 50 different sources. This stuff is murky because it plays out in secret. It’s then mirrored in public, mostly falsely, because there’s a market for speculation.

30 years ago we probably wouldn’t ever hear of them until they were almost complete, now we’re bombarded with news of ‘interest’ and ‘targets’ that probably don’t even mean anything. And even stuff that does still has time to go awry. You pretty much can’t take anything for certain until the clubs themselves get involved. Like Schalke here, all but confirming Leroy Sane’s move to Manchester City:

Meanwhile it’s been clear for weeks now that Manchester United have been trying to sign Paul Pogba and yet the thing has dragged on and on.

This image shows up on Paul Pogba’s Instagram, with its red highlights and it’s supposedly a hint of an impending confirmation. The twitter detectives were only encouraged by the fact that one of MUFC’s major sponsors, Chevrolet, had followed Pogba on twitter that same day. All of a sudden big money transfers are apparently foretold in Kubrickian levels of subtext. Probably at the suggestion of his loose cannon of an agent, Pogba then took the hilarious move of taking the absolute piss out of this trend with a couple more IG posts:

And that’s without even touching on the madness that was the alleged ‘medical’. On the same day that Pogba released an image of he and his agent lazing in the pool, there emerged reports out of Spain that Raiola was playing hardball by telling the doctor supposed to be in charge of Pogba’s medical not to cut his holidays short because negotiations weren’t advancing quick enough. But they named the doctor, who was in Boston watching a Red Sox game and completely perplexed about the whole thing.

Club scouting is so conclusive these days that if they’re after a guy they’ve probably been watching them and preparing to move for months – there aren’t many moves that fall apart once negotiations have begun, if one team is willing to buy, the other willing to sell and the player all good with both then they almost always find some mutually beneficial compromise. That fact alone tells you how fabricated so many transfer scoops must be, long gone are the days where transfer business was something that happened privately, these days it’s a business in and of itself and we’re just the innocent sounding boards.

So is Romelu Lukaku gonna sign with Chelsea? What about Alexandre Lacazette to Arsenal? Christian Benteke to literally anywhere? Look, you can either drive yourself crazy trying to decipher all the little clues or you can do something else, anything else. Either way, you’re not going to be any closer to the truth. The whole thing is insane.

But I know which option is the most fun.