WHEN the world record transfer fee gets more than doubled, it is bound to have a seismic effect. You get the moralisers who wonder what happened to the “working man’s game”. (It changed a long time ago and now caters to women, middle class folks and the unemployed too and it’s a form of televised entertainment.)

You get the conspiracy theorists who trot out all sorts of Financial Fair Play dodges including an absurd £280 million fee for being the “face” of Qatar 2022. (Uefa will assess this when the time comes – autumn of 2018 – and it’s worth remembering that not only have they punished them before for cooking the books, they will be under pressure from Europe’s elite to do so again… if PSG transgress.)

You get Barcelona fans despairing at the gall of someone wanting to leave a place that describes itself as “more than a club”. (Not to worry: they won before Neymar, they won with Neymar, they will win without him too.)

You get Neymar talking about how it’s not about the money – he says he could have made more elsewhere – and wanting a “bigger challenge” than riding on Lionel Messi’s coat-tails. (While there are clubs who probably could have paid him more, it’s doubtful any would have, and, as for the challenge, good luck to him.)

And, of course, you have Paris St Germain where chairman Nasser Al-Khelaifi introduced him as the “best player in the world”. (Simply put: he’s not.)

Much has been said and written about this deal, but two further points are worth making. The first is that Al-Khelaifi himself admitted that Neymar’s new contract has a release clause, just like the Barcelona one did. We don’t know how much it is, but, unlike Barcelona who are subjected to Liga rules, PSG were under no obligation to give him one.

That ought to set off alarm bells, no matter how high it might be (Barcelona, of course, thought £200m was sufficiently high). Outside of Spain, where such clauses are mandatory, players insist on release clauses for one of two reasons. Either they demand them in exchange for reducing their wage demands (which doesn’t seem to be the case here) or they want to give themselves an “out”.

Given Neymar’s history – and the influence of his father in the murky move to Barcelona in 2013 – that release clause seems rather ominous.

The other is that Neymar himself is putting a lot on the line here. Sure, PSG’s Qatari owners can shower him with cash, but in terms of football legacy, he is rolling the dice. In sporting terms he joins a club that hasn’t advanced past the Champions League quarter-finals and is run by an embattled, under-fire manager that now needs to redesign his side to suit him. And it also applies in financial terms. Neymar trades off his brand and he will get a lot less exposure at PSG. In other words, he’s taking on risk, too, it’s just that we are blinded by the headline figures. For that, at least, maybe he deserves a scrap of credit? Just a little, mind.

FOOL me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. But three times?

In 1997, it was the original Ronaldo. He had just been voted Fifa World Player of the Year, he had torn up La Liga and, partly due to a bungled contract renegotiation, he left for Inter Milan via a buy-out clause of £19.5m, a world record at the time.

In 2000, it was Luis Figo. He was a fan favourite, arguably the best winger in the world and he joined arch-rivals Real Madrid via a buy-out clause for £37m, also a world record.

And now, Neymar. Those who don’t know their history are condemned to repeat it, as the saying goes.

What must be galling to Barcelona fans isn’t that PSG paid the buy-out clause, or even the level at which it was set (it rose every season). Rather, it’s the way they misread him (and his father). It was as if the possibility never crossed their minds. And, when he did move, it caught them entirely unprepared. That’s simply very poor stewardship on the part of those running the club.

AS curtain-raisers go, today’s Community Shield pitting Arsenal against Chelsea offers up more of the same when it comes to the managers. Arsene Wenger, a few months shy of his 68th birthday, is still at the helm of the Gunners and still very much omnipotent.

Until six months ago, he effectively left Arsenal in limbo, refusing to commit his future to the club, an attitude which had a knock-on effect on Alexis Sanchez, Mesut Ozil and Alec Oxlade-Chamberlain. All three are regulars and key men –particularly in his newfangled 3-4-3 – and all three could leave as free agents in a few months. No matter. It will either be somebody else’s problem should Wenger depart or, should he stay, it will be another opportunity to muse about greed and transfer follies and how Arsenal search for value, all the while delivering hefty profits to his owner.

We have been here before. And we have had this sort of transfer campaign before too. Sead Kolasinac is a great pick-up on a free transfer after a very good season with Schalke and, at 24, fits the bill. He is not a game-changer yet, but he is on the cusp. Alexandre Lacazette is a prolific centre-forward who, at 26, is entering the prime of his career and, for £52m-plus is a record signing that ought to be generating more excitement. And yet, because of the uncommitted trio (really, a quartet, if you add Wenger) the sense is one of treading water.

Antonio Conte’s attitude this summer may be different from last season, when he was new and on his best behaviour, but long-time Conte-watchers see a re-run of what happened during his time at Juventus. Each season, he would win the league and each summer he would campaign for the club to make more and better signings, saying the squad needed to improve.

That helps explain why, after spending some £130m on Alvaro Morata, Antonio Rudiger and Tiemoue Bakayoko, he is still banging the drum, going so far as to warn that inaction might lead to a campaign like Jose Mourinho’s final year, when, as champions, they slipped to the brink of the relegation zone.

These two feel like familiar actors playing familiar roles. Which, in some ways, is comfortably reassuring as we welcome in the new season.