HAVING cost Portsmouth a mere £500 from Cowes Sports in 1995, you could hear the roars of laughter from Moss Side all the way down in Fareham when Manchester City forked out an eye-watering £3m for Lee Bradbury just two years later.

You could understand the mirth. After all, Alan Shearer had cost Blackburn just £300,000 more in 1992.

Shearer, of course, would go on to become the Premier League’s greatest scorer of goals and Rovers would receive a then world record fee of £15m when he moved back home to Newcastle in 1996. That fee was just £2m more than Cherries are rumoured to have paid for Jordon Ibe this summer.

The difference? Ibe’s 21 league appearances (10 from the bench) for Liverpool compared with Shearer’s 248 by the time he arrived on Tyneside, not to mention his 136 league goals at that stage in his career.

All of which makes the fees being paid for players this summer, with the number of noughts usually reserved for a UK Eurovision entry, both barmy and, yet, also unsurprising.

It’s all rather obscene, yet the severe price of Premier League relegation dictates. And that’s why £3m for Brad Smith, a player with only five Premier League appearances to his name, should not be a signing that causes such waves of despair. At least not yet. It is the price of potential in this most bizarre of marketplaces.

John Stones could move from Everton to Manchester City for as much as £50m this summer. Ryiad Mahrez could join Arsenal for the same fee. In the Championship, with so many teams sitting, necks straining underneath the Premier League carrot, Anthony Knockaert could be about to sign for Newcastle, from Brighton, for around £8m.

Like Shearer 20 years ago, whose £15m transfer would still only be around £25m in today’s money, the figures for the likes of Mahrez and Stones are the price one pays for proven ability if not bags of experience.

That kind of money, and the astronomical wages and signing-on fees that run alongside it, is reserved solely for the Premier League’s top table and Champions League football. For the rest scrapping away in middle table and below, the only question managers will ask their boards is: “Do you want to stay in the Premier League and receive all that crisp TV cash?” A Geldof-esque “Then give us the ******* money” follows the almost inevitable “Yes”. Unless you’re Steve Bruce.

In Cherries’ case, the heads of the supporters are clearly still spinning from the rise of the past six years and £13m for any player is simply unfathomable.

That question to the board is one they must ask themselves.