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The End of the Transfer Fee

The two transfers that drew all the oxygen from the summer of 2021 were both monuments to the past.

Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo have dominated their sport for a generation. That they are both, now, approaching their autumns did not matter; as soon as the chance to to sign them arose, neither Paris St.-Germain nor Manchester United paused for thought. Any doubt at all about what they might do, how they might fit, was assuaged by what they had done.

Amid all of the noise generated by those two moves — and two of the greatest players of all time changing clubs in the space of a few weeks will generate a lot of noise — another transfer, one that might come to be seen, in time, as a harbinger, rather faded into the background.