Caicedo to Chelsea for £100m could end up being good, bad or indifferent, but it is definitely very funny

Moises Caicedo, then. Hundred million quid. Rising to 115 million with add-ons, so let’s use that number, yeah? Because it’s the bigger and therefore funnier number.

There’s a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth about this transfer and we get it. We’re still struggling to get our heads round a world where a player like Caicedo – fine footballer that he obviously and unquestionably is – sparks a furious nine-figure bidding war between a pair of superclubs.

It’s an unusual world, but it’s the one in which we find ourselves and thus we must make the best of it.

One good thing about this world, Caicedoworld if you will, is that it is a very funny world. This has been an enormously entertaining transfer, and if we ever so slightly shut our eyes and ears to the absurd realities of the amount of money involved and what other, better uses it might have on a broken, burning planet, then we can all have a right good chuckle about it.

Because while Chelsea may ultimately have got their man, they’ve not done so with any real dignity have they? There’s a reason that the Succession ‘Congratulations on saying the biggest number, you f**king morons’ meme has been so well-worn on the socials in recent days. So Chelsea look daft, even if they’ve ended up with a real good footballer at the end of it.

Liverpool look absurd, and if you’re not a Liverpool fan, that is always quite an enjoyable state of affairs. We know lots of Liverpool fans, and a great many of them are fine and wonderful people. But there is also absolutely no doubt that a certain breed of Liverpool fan exists for whom that club is not just the centre of their universe but of everyone’s. Where Liverpool’s inherent and unquestioned superiority means all things revolve around them.

Thus a player preferring to join Chelsea isn’t just a player making a career decision but one exhibiting some kind of fatal personality flaw. Liverpool legend John Aldridge is so over Caicedo and his inexplicable preference for joining Chelsea that he’s written not one but two spectacularly salty columns in the last three days explicitly expressing how little he is bothered. He’s not mad. Please don’t put in the newspaper that he got mad.

Liverpool taking their eye off the Romeo Lavia deal to try and hijack the Caicedo deal without checking whether Caicedo was even up for it suggests this kind of warped thinking has now infected Liverpool – previously absolute masters of the transfer game – at a cellular level. That Lavia is now also off to Chelsea is undeniably funny as Big Todd Boehly once again says the biggest number.

Southampton are also therefore winners here, but obviously the biggest success story is Brighton. They’re developing such a reputation for this that it’s very soon going to become absolutely impossible for them to sign anyone at all. The moment they try to do so, the big boys will just come steaming in to cut out the middle man and save themselves 80 million quid. Brighton’s brilliance in the transfer market is inherently self-limiting. They’re too good at it for their own good.

For now, though, it’s another absurd profit on a player they’ve already forgotten because that’s what they do again and again and again. It’s Brighton’s world, and Chelsea just live in it.

While Liverpool, who in a previous life would just quietly pay the necessary price to bring in a Van Dijk or an Alisson, are now tragicomic figures there’s not doubt it’s Chelsea at the chaotic heart of all this.

We find ourselves becoming huge fans, against our wishes and better judgement, of Boehly and his antics. His supervillainy is so cartoonishly outsized that he’s almost a pantomime figure. Crucially, none of the Chelsea teams – and he’s already on, what, his third? – he’s built thus far have actually been any good. Long may that continue, because ‘just spend 100 million quid on every player there is’ will be a lot less fun and a lot less funny if it actually starts working.

Roman Abramovich’s supervillainy was in no way cartoonishly fun. It was depressing and soulless and wildly, infuriatingly successful. Give us big daft Todd any day of the week.

But this new era of the £100m defensive midfielder raises those old questions about transfer fees and what they mean and whether anyone should even care. There remains an often unspoken code about who is allowed to spend these kind of fees. Much of the Liverpool-based coverage of Caicedo has the clear undertones that Liverpool have earned the right to spend over the odds on a Brighton midfielder in a way Chelsea have not. Daft, really, because surely nobody has more right to overpay for Brighton players than Chelsea? It’s what they do.

Arsenal, meanwhile, can spend nine figures on Declan Rice and everyone agrees it is good and proper, and above all they can still be plucky little underdogs fighting against the despicable unstoppable Manchester City machine.

But really, transfer fees are just meaningless – if increasingly startling – numbers. There’s already a flood of ‘If Caicedo is worth X then our player Y is worth Z’ and it just absolutely does not work like that.

A player’s transfer worth comes down to two things. What one team is willing to pay and whether that corresponds to what one team is willing to accept. Circumstances will always be different and comparisons are pointless. If Caicedo succeeds, does it matter that he cost more on his own than Spurs’ entire first-choice midfield of Bentancur, Bissouma and Maddison? No. Does Maddison moving for £40m because Leicester got relegated make £40m the going rate for the league’s next best No. 10? No.

Such comparisons are futile. Saying the largest number in a transfer deal is ultimately what matters, but it’s nothing to do with the player. We don’t know whether Caicedo will be a good buy, a disaster or merely indifferent. Liverpool know better than most about how well paying seemingly over the odds for the exact player you want and need can pan out. Maybe Caicedo is that for Chelsea.

We can’t possibly know, so let’s focus on the one thing we do know for sure about this transfer. It’s very, very funny.