Transfer chills are multiplying

There must have been a moment, during Leeds United's negotiation to loan Mykhailo Mudryk from Chelsea, when Leeds' representatives wondered who was doing a favour for who.

Chelsea had to find a way for Mudryk to play, but their reported conditions sound onerous. A £7m loan fee, full cover for Mudryk's high wages, guarantees of playing time and in the end a £75m option to buy. All for a player who has sat out of football for twenty months due to a doping ban, following a £62m transfer to Stamford Bridge and fifty underwhelming games. What was the bargaining chip here, exactly? That if Leeds didn't take him, Chelsea would loan him to their sibling-club, Strasbourg? Or that they'd find some club stupid enough to do a deal on those terms?

Maybe that was the lightbulb moment for everyone. Oh yeah, Tottenham! Why don't you give Tottenham a ring? Good point actually, we'll give Tottenham a ring. Tottenham were rung. Tottenham did the deal.

And Leeds trundled off to the Bundesliga again, and Eintracht Frankfurt again, to sign Jean-Mattéo Bahoya on loan with a £21m option. It's nice to have friends we can rely on, and a week after supplying Michael Zetterer to be our new back-up goalkeeper, Frankfurt came through again. Maybe they feel like they owe us for Rasmus Kristensen, Robin Koch and Felix Weidwald. Although I worry that particular debt might carry Agatha Christie levels of menace.

Debt is an important consideration here and it feels better, from Leeds United's point of view, to be on a future hook for £21m rather than the £75m Tottenham have to keep to one side. Mudryk might be a great success at the new White Hart Lane, although for him and them that's all relative. Leeds seemed to reckon he was the best option out there, until the weekend, anyway. But their final decision seems to be that whatever potential differences there are between Mudryk and Bahoya aren't worth the extra £54m, or whatever the year's loan and wages' worth, that Chelsea were expecting.

We'll see how it all turns out, as with every transfer. Even Old Mother Shipton would rustle away back into her cave rather than try reading the runes on football players' future performances, although that doesn't stop Premier League executives and pundits confidently declaring their own excellence once the ink is dry on a new winger's contract. Nothing can possibly go wrong now! they cry, after allocating a £100m of future revenue to some 22-year-old kidult's prowess.

Or £25m-ish for Bahoya, and if you can hear sighs of satisfaction on the Zoom calls from Beeston to Santa Clara this week, I wonder if they're more sighs of relief. Firstly because the Leeds x 49ers Enterprises axis kept the fans off their backs for a few weeks — and their own manager — by ticking off some necessaries in the final transfer days: goalie, left-back, winger. And secondly because they managed to avoid becoming too entangled in this window's ratio-fuelled insanity by shopping in Europe rather than the Premier League.

I was writing, back when Leeds signed Harry Wilson for free, about this summer's transfer fees stretching to nine-figure numbers for no apparent reason beyond Premier League clubs testing each other. They'll never pay £90,000,000, they'll never pay £116,000,000, they'll never pay £125,000,000. And each time — Sandro Tonali, Elliot Anderson, Enzo Fernandez, and we're skipping a few — they will. Now the window has closed it's still not possible to find the rationale for those numbers.