On Friday, Manchester City reportedly made a “final offer” for Everton defender John Stones of about £40 million. If the noises coming from Goodison are more than a bluff, Pep Guardiola’s club will either have to swallow their pride and come back with a much heftier bid – north of £50m – or find another ball-playing centre-back.

It’s a fairly extraordinary position for the England player when you consider that a year ago Chelsea thought they could secure him for £32m and, since then, he has had a difficult time, both for Everton and with England.

It’s a natural question: Why do City value him so highly after the season he’s had?

Part of it is the new television deal, of course. Part of it is the fact he is English and, as such, helps satisfy the Premier League’s home-grown player requirement and, at 22 years of age, will help satisfy said requirement for the next decade. Even if he doesn’t live up to his potential as some kind of latter-day Rio Ferdinand, if he merely becomes a serviceable squad player filling in now and then, he will still be a body ticking one of the homegrown player boxes for the next 10 years and City will be paying a relatively modest £5m a season (plus wages) for the privilege. In other words, unless he turns out to be a dud, you can, with a bit of spin, justify it.

Further ratcheting up his value to City is the fact that Guardiola’s system is predicated upon a ball-playing centre-half (ideally two, but you take what you can get). With Vincent Kompany past the age of 30 and beset by injuries (and even when fit, not exactly the second coming of Franz Beckenbauer), there’s nobody with that skill set in City’s ranks. What’s more, there aren’t too many players of that ilk on the market across Europe.

It is difficult to imagine the great Guardiola experiment succeeding or failing based on whether he can sign a 22-year-old who had a horrendous season at a mid-table club, but it might not be far off it.

So much for that whole “bringing through youth” thing and Jose Mourinho’s wacky list of the 49 youngsters to whom he gave debuts during his career. Nine Manchester United players were told they do not figure in the Special One’s plans this season. Seven of them are 21 or younger, the other two are veteran midfielder Bastian Schweinsteiger and striker Will Keane, who is 23 and scored a grand total of one goal on loan at Preston last season.

It should be stressed that some are merely going out on loan so they can gain the sort of valuable playing time that Mourinho won’t be able to offer them at Old Trafford. Of course, when you are told you are not needed and you have a single season left on your deal – like Keane or defenders Paddy McNair and Tyler Blackett – it is rather like an invitation to up sticks.

Indeed, even guys like Andreas Pereira, Tim Fosu-Mensah and Adnan Januzaj – who have two years left – present a conundrum. If you loan them out and they do well, they will come back with just a single season remaining on their deals. And at that point, they will have all the leverage in any negotiation. Or, worse, they can lie low for a season and leave on a free transfer. The flip side is that extending their deals now means committing to them long term.

Mourinho’s critics will no doubt point fingers and accuse him of in fact betraying the sacred mission of developing youngsters. But the reality is that United’s website lists 35 professionals in the first team. Take those nine out of the mix, add one or two new signings (there’s that tall French guy everyone’s talking about and, perhaps, an additional defender) and you are left with 28. That is a lot, particularly for a manager who rotated very little while at Chelsea.

This is about Mourinho’s core mission this season. Is it to chuck a whole load of homegrown products in the mixer hoping some will stick? Or is it to get United back into the Champions League and, ideally, challenge for the title?

You would assume it’s the latter. You’re not paying Zlatan Ibrahimovic £300,000 a week to play big brother to a bunch of kids learning the trade.

Plus, even without those nine, Mourinho will still have half a dozen first-teamers aged 22 or younger to work with.

The other wrinkle in the Paul Pogba affair concerns that extra 20 per cent commission which supposedly is due his agent, Mino Raiola. With a base fee of around £100m, we would be talking £20m, prompting all sorts of clucking and shaking of disapproving heads. The premise – according to reports in Spain and England – is that Raiola is somehow entitled to 20 per cent of Pogba’s fee.

This is a classic case of unknowns though. And it’s curious to note how different media in different countries have handled it. Nobody has confirmed on the record that the clause exists; most have reported it, albeit with various wrinkles. In Italy – where perhaps Juventus’ influence on the media is greatest – it was initially described in the same way as elsewhere: a clause whereby Raiola would get 20 per cent of the Pogba fee. Then it became a “gentleman’s agreement” between the club and Raiola. And then, over the past week, it turned into a “gentleman’s agreement” with the money going not to Raiola, but directly to Pogba.

I have no idea if this is true. I am fairly confident that if the agreement (gentleman’s or otherwise) exists it’s not written in any official document. That’s because Juventus say it isn’t (and they can’t just make it up, since they are listed on the stock market and have obligations to shareholders) and, more to the point, because an agent getting a cut of a player’s transfer fee is a form of third-party ownership, which happens to be illegal.

The one thing that appears obvious though is the age-old rule whereby agents, like any sellers of services, charge what the market can bear and if you don’t want Raiola to make a £20m commission, don’t pay him. But if you think Pogba is worth an extra £20m to Raiola, go ahead and sign the cheque.