If one word could describe the European summer transfer market of 2016, "explosive" would certainly be the most fitting. But if one word could describe the feelings of those working in European football, it had to be "astonishment."
It was astonishing to the point of leaving people speechless!
This was not because Pogba had set a new all-time transfer record, nor because Higuaín had set the highest transfer record in Serie A history. Those were merely the results, the outward appearances. What was truly astonishing lay beneath the surface.
In fact, there had been signs of this storm for a long time.
Over the past few years, as wealthy clubs such as Man City and Paris Saint-Germain went on massive buying sprees, hot money from all over the world had poured into European football. This year, for example, Suling from China acquired Inter Milan. As a result, top players in European football had become scarce, while demand far outstripped supply, and their prices immediately skyrocketed.
Therefore, in the summer of this year, Pogba's transfer fee surpassed one hundred million euros, breaking the record Yang Yang had set in 2009.
Everyone had expected it. They simply had not expected Pogba to be the one.
What shocked people was that Juventus immediately turned around and paid the staggering sum of ninety million euros for Higuaín. This completely stunned the world. After all, Higuaín was already twenty-eight years old.
Was this still the Serie A everyone knew?
Stones, Sané, Xhaka, Mkhitaryan, Mané, Mustafi, João Mário, Batshuayi...
One familiar yet strangely unfamiliar name after another. Some of these players might not even have been recognized by fans who were not particularly familiar with European football. Yet all of them were being sold for astronomical fees of forty or fifty million euros, and almost all