WHAT would dear old Willie Groves have made of it all?

In 1893, this Glaswegian became the first £100 player in Association Football when Aston Villa broke the world transfer record, luring them as they did West Bromwich Albion.

Willie by all accounts was some forward in his day. His biography is full of hat-tricks and tales of daring do. He was the star for Villa as they won the league that season and his international record read three caps, four goals.

Given how long ago this was, adjusting the one hundred quid for inflation is a bit of a nonsense but for those who like that kind of thing the fee in today’s money comes in at roughly £15,000.

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The world record fee paid for a footballer has been broken 44 times since Willie and over the next few days the £89m Manchester United spent on Paul Pogba last year is going to be shattered by the – are you sitting down – £199m deal which will see the Brazilian Neymar move from Barcelona to Paris Saint-Germain.

That figure was the release clause inserted by the Catalan club almost as a token gesture because surely nobody is going to pay that much for any player. PSG are, however, owned by the Qatari royal family. These are awfully rich people.

Football supporters turn a blind eye and close their ears to the obscene sums of money which flood game. We hear Lionel Messi is to earn £500,000 a week and hardly a single eyebrow gets raised because, well, that’s how it is these days.

But the Neymar transfer feels as if a line has been crossed; that football has lost something when such a sickening amount of money, raised from a country with a questionable approach to human rights let’s not forget, is spent on just one man when over 80 per cent of the world’s population lives on less than $10 a day.

The 25-year-old is expected in Qatar today to talk with PSG. The murmurings coming out of Barcelona are that the deal is done and his last game for them was in a friendly against, of all teams, Real Madrid in Miami.

Qatari newspaper El Watan claimed Neymar will fly to Doha for a meeting with PSG chairman Nasser Al-Khelaifi. The stopover on a return flight from a promotional trip to China - and doesn’t that say it all - could also include a medical. The game has officially gone.

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Thiago Silva and Dani Alves, Neymar’s international team-mates, have both spoken publicly about their fellow countryman’s move with the latter urging his friend to “be brave”.

As Alves, no at PSG himself, said: “It’s a decision you have to make carefully but you have to be selfish. If I could advise one thing it would be: be brave, the world belongs to the brave.”

As if bravery has anything to do with this. Try greed.

That Neymar da Silva Santos Júnior is a world class footballer is beyond dispute. At 25, his best years should be ahead of him and as such he was always costs any club a pretty penny.

In his four seasons in Spain he has scored 104 goals, contributed a huge amount of assists and heaven knows how many flicks and tricks this wonderful talent has produced while marked by three players.

But here is the thing.

Neymar is not the best player in the world. He is not even the best player in his team. Ask yourself this. Is he one of the all-time greats, up there with Pele, Maradona and Cruyff?

It’s not disgrace being a level, or arguably two, beneath those three but when a club is spending one fifth of billion on just one bloke, the expectation must be that he is the greatest of all time. He is far from that.

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The history of football records show that not every record breaking deal guarantees success.

Gianluigi Lentini moved from Torino to Milan in 1992 for £13m and struggled to hold down a place. Denilson cost Real Betis £21.5 in 1998 and within two years the Spanish club were relegated. Pogba has yet properly prove himself for Manchester United.

The deal is not without its complications. Barcelona may ask UEFA to look into whether PSG have breached their Financial Fair Play regulations which state no European club can spend more than they earn.

PSG were punished three years ago for just this. They were fined £20m, their spending was capped to £49m and they competed in the 2014-15 Champions League with just 21 players instead of the usual 25.

The French club could sell players to balance the books to get around FFP but even another fine is hardly going to put them off.

A £200m transfer always felt like someone going around St Andrews for a score of 59 or the 100m being run in under nine seconds. They are nice sporting talking points but will never happen.

But this is where football is and, of course, it is impossible not to wonder who will spend bigger because that is absolutely going to happen. The mind boggles and the stomach grows queasy.