Why £19m Burnley swoop for Man City starlet James Trafford could be the maddest deal of the summer

The way I see it, there are two possibilities. Either Vincent Kompany knows something we don’t, or he’s actually been a Manchester City sleeper agent this whole time, and has been deployed by Pep Guardiola to infiltrate the upper echelons of a fellow North Western football club so that the treble winners have a ready-made subsidiary destination for their unwanted junk where the manager just so happens to have a burning desire to pay wildly over the odds for a bunch of bum-fluff-sporting hand-me-downs.

Hell, at this point, maybe should we be asking if it’s a coincidence that the Belgian has started wearing so many baseball caps since he rocked up at Turf Moor twelve months ago? Could we even have a Professor Quirrell/Lord Voldemort situation on our hands? Heaven knows Kompany has the cranial real estate for it.

By the time the dust settles on this summer’s transfer window and we have coughed the very last plume of soot from our wheezing lungs, there will be a whole array of completed deals that could comfortably be described as ‘unhinged’. Many of them will involve the Saudi Pro League. But surely none will surpass Burnley’s decision to pay £19 million for James Trafford.

At the time of writing, the sum total of the 20-year-old’s senior experience amounts to 80 League One appearances spread over two loans spells with Accrington Stanley and Bolton Wanderers, six outings in the fabled Papa John’s Deep Dish Stuffed Crust Pizza Cup of Dreams, and one solitary FA Cup defeat to Barnsley. Quite how he is worth neck end of £20 million is nothing short of mystifying. By this yardstick of valuation, if and when England number one Jordan Pickford leaves Everton, he could become the world’s first ever billion pound player. We’re all screwed.

Facetiousness aside, Trafford’s seemingly imminent transfer to Vinny K’s claret vibe convoy is set to churn up enough scratched heads to cripple both the tea tree oil shampoo and antihistamine industries alike. There’s no arguing that he is a goalkeeper of immense potential. As we mull over his future, he is currently away on international duty with England’s U21 side, and he was voted Bolton’s Young Player of the Year last season after helping them reach the League One play-offs. But again, you find yourself coming back to that exorbitant figure; £19 million - an initial £15 million followed by a further £4 million in add-ons. Has he done anything to justify such a price tag at this fledgling stage of his career? The simple, inescapable answer is a resounding no.

It’s the kind of deal that skews an entire market. It brings to mind a personal debacle that I refer to as The Giant Cola Bottle Crisis of 2008. For the longest time when I was younger, a giant cola bottle from the corner shop on my estate was 10p. Then, all of a sudden, one day it was 15p. Then a few weeks later, 20p. Same gelatinous treat, same dimensions, double the price. I mithered and I grumbled, but I still paid up because of course I did. To co-opt the biblical teachings of Matthew 4:4, man shall not live by bread alone. And then next thing you know, a giant cola bottle from Balogan’s News and Wine is setting you back a whopping 30 british pennies. Admittedly, there were bigger financial injustices that beset the world in 2008, but none were quite so galling to a sweet-toothed, pencil-necked adolescent in a County Durham pit village as that one.

Trafford is, in essence, a 30p giant cola bottle. There is nothing to signify that he should cost as much as he does other than the whims of whoever is currently unholstering the price sticker gun at the Etihad. Maybe he will make good on his notable potential, maybe he will be England number one in the relatively near future, and maybe he will use his gilded palms to lift trophy after trophy after trophy. But how on earth is anybody supposed to accurately determine any of that based on two seasons in the third tier? It’s avaricious lunacy.

Or, depending on your perspective, it’s very astute business. After all, nobody is making Burnley pay such an absurd amount of money for a player with as much top flight experience as me. (Unless, of course, Pep actually has grafted himself onto the back of Kompany’s magnificent dome.) They evidently believe that Trafford is a bit special, and that this is the kind of investment which could return dizzying dividends further down the line.

Then again, even that profit might be limited substantially by the apparent buy-back clause that City have scribbled into the fine print. There’s no word on exactly how much said clause is worth, but don’t expect it to be any steeper than the lowlands from which Big Vince himself hails.

To call it a glorified loan deal would be a touch excessive, but at the very least this is a low stakes agreement for City. Either Trafford shines as Burnley envisage and they snatch him back to their oily bosom, or he flops and they steal away into the night with a hearty cackle and a burlap sack marked with a dollar sign. It is quite the foolproof hustle.

None of this, by the way, is to cast any kind of aspersion on Trafford himself. He is a good footballer who could well grow into a great footballer, and, sincerely, best of luck to him on that trek. But even he must be sat there, twiddling his thumbs in whatever Romania’s equivalent to a Travelodge is, wondering what the hell is going on.