KYLIAN Mbappe has started 19 top-flight games. He also has eight starts in France’s domestic cup competition, seven in the Champions League and another two for France at international level. That’s 36 games started in total.

As bodies of work go, it’s a lot for an 18-year-old. It’s nothing for a guy who may well move for more than one-and-a-half times the current transfer record this summer.

Scour the history of football and, while others may have received comparable hype this early in their careers, nobody has attracted world record bids with such ease based on such limited experience.

That can only suggest one of three things. Either Mbappe really is far and away the greatest can’t-miss outlier in the history of the game. Or, circumstances and business dynamics have changed to the point that a £150 million-plus bid for someone who wasn’t even old enough to vote this time last year somehow makes sense. Or, perhaps, we have all lost our collective minds.

Mbappe’s club Monaco appear to be leaning towards the last. And that may explain why, after Real Madrid moved decisively for the player, they spent most of last week trying to drum up interest from Europe’s other deep-pocketed blue-bloods. From Barcelona to Chelsea, from Arsenal to Manchester City, emissaries reached out with the same message: “We’d really rather not sell. But if you’d like to test our resolve, now is the time.”

Until recently, Monaco were consistent in their message, as was Mbappe. The boy said he felt he needed at least another year at the club to mature and grow into the footballer he would like to be. The club said he had only scratched the surface of his talents and it was in everyone’s interest to let him develop in the Principality for another season.

What caused the about-face?

Probably the fact that Madrid made their move and the fact Mbappe has thus far refused Monaco’s offer of an extension. That’s relevant because next June he enters the final year of his contract, meaning his transfer value will plummet. And that means tens of millions of Euros will go up in smoke.

From Mbappe’s perspective, of course, the opposite applies. If he sits tight, in a year’s time he will hold all the cards, provided, of course, he doesn’t get injured and his performance doesn’t drop. And, you suppose, the rest of European football doesn’t come to its senses.

But the lure of Madrid may well prove to be too strong. Particularly when there are photographs of him doing the rounds showing him in his bedroom surrounded by Real Madrid paraphernalia as a kid, which, in his case, are just three years old.

As for Madrid, the deal makes no sense. When you have won three of the last four Champions League titles, it is hard to see the logic in adding a guy who remains a very promising player, but nothing more. Not when it costs you more than a quarter of your annual turnover anyway. And not when signing him means adding to an already congested front line which includes Cristiano Ronaldo, Gareth Bale, Karim Benzema and Isco.

Then again, conventional wisdom doesn’t often apply to Madrid and Florentino Perez. And because Mbappe will need minutes on the pitch to continue growing, one of the aforementioned quartet – most likely Bale – will be peddled elsewhere. Already the Spanish media is linking the Welshman – whose main “crime” seems to be that he was injured in the final months of last season – with a move to Manchester United. The Old Trafford club can certainly afford him, he would make them better and Ed Woodward has been craving that “statement signing” for years.

But yet this doesn’t feel like a footballing move, more like something to accommodate Real Madrid; something extemporaneous, that falls into United’s lap because of events elsewhere.

Between this and Neymar, it is rapidly turning into one of the wildest, most unexpected transfer sessions in recent memory. And the game itself is becoming harder and harder to understand.

Ten days ago Mauricio Pochettino sat in the sweltering Orlando mid-day and confronted the fact that Tottenham Hotspur, other than selling Kyle Walker to Manchester City for a record fee, had been basically inert in this transfer window.

“We’re in that tricky position where if we’re going to add to our squad we need to find guys we can realistically get who will also make our team better or, at least, offer something different,” he said. “And the reality is that our team is young and already very good. Not many players fit the bill.”

It is difficult to argue with that logic, maybe because it actually is logical (unlike, say, the approach taken by Real Madrid over Mbappe).

Whether Ross Barkley makes Tottenham better is debatable. It is hard to see who he would displace in the starting XI, for example. But he does offer something different to what they have: he’s a hard-running wrecking ball of a midfielder who, in certain situations, can give them an alternative way of attacking.

He is also likely to be relatively inexpensive because Everton have pretty much frozen him out (Ronald Koeman has said in no uncertain terms that he won’t be playing again for the club).

Add in the fact he is English and yet to turn 24 and it is pretty much a no-brainer: either he develops into the player some felt he could be when he first broke into Everton’s first team or he retains much of his resale value and can be dumped on to a West Ham or a Stoke or any of a number of (relatively) deep-pocketed mid-tier Premier League clubs.

You could easily argue that, in keeping with this summer’s theme, this move too wouldn’t be strictly about footballing reasons either. But in this case, it doesn’t really matter. It’s a clever move with limited downside. And if Spurs are blessed with the upside and Barkley lives up to his potential, it can add up to a massive leap forward.