JUST like that, the transfer circus comes to town. In the space of a few hours Friday, Arsenal triggered Jamie Vardy’s £22 million release clause (he may or may not agree to a move) and Manchester United reportedly took a huge step closer to signing Zlatan Ibrahimovic.

We may have a European Championship kicking off in a few days, but transfers fuel the club game. And, particularly with an opening round that promises plenty of dead rubbers and teams stocked with unfamiliar players (go on, name Hungary’s back four, I dare you...), stuff like this dominates. Hope for a brighter future trumps the here and now.

What’s interesting is the nature of the targets. Both seem counterintuitive.

It’s not that Vardy, the Football Writers’ Association Player of the Year, isn’t a fine footballer. It’s that he’s a guy who thrived on the wide open spaces and lightning quick ball movement generated by Leicester’s counter-attack. Which is simply not the way Arsenal - with their intricate passing and build-up and endless possession in the opponent’s final third - tend to play.

There’s also the fact that while Vardy’s story is compelling - released, monitoring ankle bracelet, non-league, Premier League champion and England star - in his only other Premier League season - 2014-15 - he scored a mere 5 goals. That was under Nigel Pearson, who may not have played a Wengeresque style, but still was much less of a counte-rattacker than Claudio Ranieri.

Most of all, a move for Vardy makes a clear statement that Arsenal will not be signing the stud, £50m-plus centre-forward many fans are pining for. With Danny Welbeck showing plenty production when he came back from injury and Olivier Giroud providing an aerial threat, that would be the Gunners full attacking complement. (There’s also Theo Walcott hanging about and, if anything, he could be the most likely to move.)

Does Wenger spot qualities in Vardy that were unseen by others? Will he turn Arsenal into a direct, counter-attacking side? Is this merely a move to flush out other contenders for Vardy’s signature? Time will tell.

As for Ibrahimovic, well, if he comes on board, there will be no way for United to deflect the short-termist accusations. He turns 35 in October and, more importantly, he plays centre-forward on a team that already has three of them, though, to be fair, one is 18 (Marcus Rashford), one has already been bumped to the wing (Anthony Martial) and one thinks he’s a midfielder (Wayne Rooney).

Most of all though, Ibrahimovic tends to dominate every team he’s on. It’s been that way at every stop in his career, other than Barcelona, and that ended badly. He affects everything on a team and, because his skill set is unique, when he goes the team will necessarily have to change. What you’re doing by bringing him in at this stage of his career is effectively hitting the “pause” button on any kind of development and going for silverware straight away.

Some will no doubt criticize this. The same ones who fret about Jose Mourinho and his supposed inability to “bring through youth”. And the ones who lampoon French football as if scoring in Le Championnat was like shooting fish in a barrel. (Even if Ligue 1 was half as good as the Premier League, Ibrahimovic scored 38 goals last season... United’s top goalscorer, Martial, had 11.)

But they’re missing the point. It’s been three seasons of futility at Old Trafford. One was spent believing that adding Marouane Fellaini and, later, Juan Mata, would make up for the fact that David Moyes isn’t Sir Alex Ferguson. The other two were spent investing £250m in the rebuilding project of a guy who made it clear he would not be around to see it through.

Mourinho may or may not be capable of building a team from the ground up. We can’t say for sure. But what we do know is that he’s built his rep on winning with big spending superclubs. And if you’re a superclub and you can spend big and you’ve added Mourinho (rather than some nurturing, long-term project type manager) does it not make sense to pull the trigger and go for it here and now?

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The jury is out on the “new” FIFA but one thing that appears clear is their ability to play the “news cycle” game.

On Thursday, a report in the German paper “Die Welt” revealed that leaked emails from FIFA suggested that Gianni Infantino, the new president, had ordered that audio files containing a recording of a FIFA Council meeting in Mexico City be destroyed.

FIFA fired back by saying that the emails referred to a copy of the audio files stored on a local disk and that the original was safe and sound in the FIFA archive.

What to make of this? We’re in the realm of speculation, but once you get past the knee-jerk anti-FIFA reaction, it seems a bit far-fetched that Infantino would try to re-write history when there were thirty-plus FIFA Council members in the room, some of whom are not Infantino fans and who could easily contradict whatever he puts out in the official minutes.

Still, it was a bit of a bloody nose for the “new” FIFA since most media outlets, understandably, take Zurich skullduggery for granted.

Solution? Release a story 24 hours later that makes it clear just how the “new” FIFA is different from the “old” one. And what better way to do it than by revealing that, over a five year period, Sepp Blatter and two of his cohorts, former Secretary General Jerome Valcke and former Chief Financial Officer Markus Kattner, had paid themselves some £60m plus in compensation. The pattern of the payments and the stipulations - like the fact that the moeny would be paid even if the individual was sacked for misconduct, which incidentally may be illegal under Swiss law - comes pretty darn close to suggesting either blackmail or, at least, a sense that if they go down, they’ll go down with their pockets full.

At the very least, the payment story shows that FIFA, or at least, Quinn Emanuel, the US law firm they’ve hired to protect them from the US Department of Justice, are serious about cleaning up. And the enormity of the payments guarantee that the missing audio files are quickly forgotten.