A year ago, Andy Carroll was playing in the Championship and considering an option to play international football for Scotland.
On Monday, he became the eighth (or possibly ninth, depending on the figures for the deal that took Carlos Tevez to Manchester City) most expensive footballer the world has ever known — having moved from Newcastle United to Liverpool for 35 million pounds (55.7 million dollars).
He has played half a season in the Premier League and has won one England cap, in which he performed decently but not exceptionally.
Carroll, 22, is a promising talent, big and strong, with a reasonable first touch and surprisingly mobile for somebody of his size, but he is out for the next month with an injury picked up falling off a bar-stool.
As his involvement in two court-cases in the past year suggest, he has a lively social life. And yet somehow he is worth more than Rangers, one of the two biggest clubs in Scotland.
That sums up the craziness of the latest transfer deadline day in England on Monday.
A day that saw Fernando Torres leave Liverpool for Chelsea for an English transfer record 50 million pounds, Carroll join Liverpool from Newcastle for 35 million, Liverpool complete the 23 million-pound signing of Luis Suarez from Ajax and fail to sign Charlie Adam form Blackpool despite a 10 million-pound bid, and Chelsea sign Davud Luiz form Benfica for 20 million pounds plus Nemanja Matic.
As the clock ticked down on a day that defied not merely expectation but credibility, Newcastle even had a 12 million-pound bid rejected by Wigan Athletic for Charles N’Zogbia, a player they swapped for Ryan Taylor two years ago.
In total, January saw English clubs spend a total of 214.5 million pounds. Some of the money was reshuffled admittedly, but it is still a staggering figure for a football industry supposedly in a period of retrenchment.
Darren Bent9s move form Sunderland to Aston Villa for an initial 18 million pounds seemed excessive, Edin Dzeko9s from Wolfsburg to Manchester City for 27 million pounds expensive, but by contrast with what happened on Monday they look entirely reasonable deals.
Amid all the grim financial news for Britain, a 40 million-pound VAT windfall must come as a great boost for the treasury, who can presumably look forward to increased income tax yields from players whose wages, in the case of Carroll, were almost trebled.
To place the figures in perspective, last January, Premier League clubs spent a total of only 29 million pounds.
How any of that squares with the Financial Fair Play programme from the European body UEFA is anybody’s guess.
Chelsea in 2006 began talking of being self-sufficient by 2011. On the day they announced transfers worth around 75 million pounds they also, almost overlooked, revealed losses for the last financial year of around 70 million.
Financial Fair Play, which attempts to ensure no club lives beyond its means and that clubs are not artificially sustained by a sugar-daddy, first starts to affect clubs from 2013-14, based on an assessment drawn between 2010 and 2012.
Nobody quite knows with what stringency it will be implemented, but Chelsea and Manchester City in particular seem to be sailing close to the wind.
