IT'S staggering to reflect that two British provincial football clubs have struck deals for Paul Pogba and John Stones this week which are worth more than UK Sport's total investment in Britain's current Summer Olympic team over four years.

Manchester United's world record fee of £89m, a clause including a further £4.5m in bonuses plus the same again if the midfielder should sign a new contract, and wages of £290,000 per week over the next six years (£90m) adds up to £188m for Pogba.

Manchester City's commitment to Stones (£47.5m) will carry a £42m wage bill over the duration of the defender's contract. That's a combined total of £278m.

UK Sport has bankrolled 20 disciplines in Rio for the current four-year cycle at a cost of £274m. They invest a further £74m in Paralympic sport.

The salaries of these two players is on the scale customarily characterised as "obscene". Pogba's annual pay is roughly five times the average wage of a FTSE chief executive and the average UK worker would take more than 550 years to earn as much.

That £278m would half fill the black hole in the BHS pension fund left by Sir Philip Green, or pay the annual salary of 11,200 staff nurses (equating to a fifth of the total employed by NHS Scotland). Pogba's £188m would pay the basic annual salary of all 650 Westminster MPs almost four times over.

Cancer Research UK spent £107m on fundraising last year – less than a quarter of what they have to spend on research.

Pogba's new clubmate and fellow midfielder, Juan Mata, is already on record as describing his own salary of £150,000 per week as "obscene". Ambassador for a street football charity, Mata told Spanish TV earlier this year: "With respect to the rest of society, we earn a ridiculous amount."

Indeed, but what a rubbing of London noses in the dirt – calculated to make the northern clubs even more hated! Buying success is offensively alien and to the British psyche, and many will feel that competitors like Katherine Grainger, Britain's record-breaking Olympic medallist, triple silver medallist David Florence – indeed, a whole raft of competitors from a range of sports – are ill-served by a culture which rewards footballers so grossly.

Inevitably, the packages for Pogba and Stones will stand to further alienate football from the rest of the British sporting community. The national game is already seen as overpaid and under-achieving both north and south of the border – witness England's demise at Euro 2016, and Scotland's failure to qualify for it.

Envy will be an inevitable reaction from sports and competitors existing on a shoestring. Many British competitors in Rio have endured all manner of sacrifices to fund their Olympic dream – taking out second mortgages and downsizing homes. It is a myth that UK Sport funds everything.

The Lottery has been a potent weapon, and has helped swimming turn around a dismal London 2012, already surpassing the target set by UK Sport, one of several sports which have already achieved the goal set by UKS, but under-achieving disciplines in Brazil face a financial reckoning.

Manchester was once ridiculed for two failed Olympic bids which were led by Sir Bob Scott. He told me that these bids had cost £7m, and insisted that this was money well spent. Manchester could not have achieved a fraction of the exposure and established the city on the map had they paid that sum to Saatchi & Saatchi, he said.

The prize, soon after, was hosting the Commonwealth Games, but after Manchester was eliminated in the third round of Olympic voting, leaving Beijing and Sydney to battle for the right to host in 2000, Britain was told not to bother throwing its hat in the ring again until London was their chosen host candidate.

Olympic fever was so rife that even Glasgow considered bidding, with Lord Provost Pat Lally instructing his staff to talk to both English cities.

It was, of course, a delusion, not of sporting grandeur, but of plain sporting adequacy. Glasgow was never going to measure up for the Olympics. Nevertheless, it also whetted the Commonwealth appetite.

It's 40 years since I was dispatched by my sports editor to cover a Glasgow Council press conference where Councillor Constance Methven unveiled a feasibility study on Glasgow hosting the Olympics. The city had spent £18,000 on the study which concluded the Games could be staged for a projected cost of £450m – a fortune in those days, and instantly dismissed. But little more than the cost of Pogba and Stones now.