Anthony Elanga is Newcastle's £55m Declan Rice or Virgil van Dijk

Anthony Elanga to Newcastle for £55m. That’s our kind of transfer.

We are often – nearly always, let’s be honest here – guilty of a cake-and-eat-it approach to the grubby business of transfers themselves, and to transfer rumours and especially to transfer bullsh*t. We like to imagine ourselves loftily above the fray, while a quick look down reveals we are in fact just rolling around in the sh*t with everyone else while occasionally going ‘Look at those fools with all sh*t on their shoes’.

See transfer rumour power ranking: Two in, one out at Newcastle; Arsenal deal done. Please.

But this is precisely the kind of transfer we actually do like, because it provokes all of the gut, kneejerk responses to a transfer all at once. It hits that rare sweet spot of being both an absurd amount of money to spend on that particular player, but also very possibly a very good idea for the particular club that’s spending it.

We’re going to confidently say that no other club in the Premier League is paying that fee for Elanga. Not even Chelsea, with their grubby little fetish for wingers on eight-year contracts, are spending that on a lad who can run fast and take a decent corner. Probably.

Yet the key point is this: that doesn’t mean it’s wrong for Newcastle to do it. They’ve spent three years very obviously and largely unsuccessfully looking for the rapid winger that could really elevate their counter-attacking football to a new level.

For all their fans’ understandable frustration at the slow-moving PSR-stunted speed of their journey to world domination, Newcastle are nevertheless a club in a pretty handy position.

Take away the unstoppable and unfillable need for the dopamine hit of transfers – any transfers – and Newcastle don’t actually have many of the standard concerns you might find elsewhere.

They are in the enormously enviable position, for instance, of already having a world-class number nine. That’s about 80% of most big clubs’ transfer-based stress eliminated at St James’ Park at a stroke.

Sure, they have to put some energy into keeping said world-class number nine out of the hands of those in urgent need of such a player, but while that might be less fun and more stressful than signing one, it’s also infinitely preferable from the club’s point of view. Especially when, as is currently the case, the contract situation leaves Newcastle in possession of all the cards.

Newcastle also boast a first-choice midfield that is close to unimprovable, again knocking out a huge chunk of potential transfer stress that occupies minds and time among several of their rivals.

And while Newcastle’s defence is not one packed full of stars in the same way as the midfield and attack, nor is it one full of conspicuous holes and irredeemable flaws.

The point is that for the most part what Newcastle’s squad needs is a bit of tinkering. A back-up player here, a utility man there. Something to bulk them out in readiness for the return of Champions League football.

They don’t need major surgery. But what they do need, and have done for a while, is an out-and-out pace merchant in wide areas. And sometimes when you need one particular player who you truly believe is going to be a conspicuous difference-maker to everything you do, you have to pay what that takes.

It’s a transfer that is by no means a guaranteed success but one that reminds us that transfer fees are not uniform. It’s an obvious point – to the point of trite, really – but one we’d all do well to remember. We’re all guilty of making the kind of ‘If Player X costs this much, then Player Y cannot possibly be worth that much’ when really that is of no relevance.

A player’s worth at any time is a confluence of events. It’s a meeting of two clubs and their situations, the player’s own situation with his home life, his contract, the point he’s reached in his career. Every one of these combined to make every transfer a unique situation that cannot just be compared to anyone else’s.

This is all obvious stuff, yet we are all capable of forgetting it.

The peak example of this kind of situation perhaps remains Kyle Walker’s £50m move from Tottenham to Manchester City in 2017. It really is easy now to forget just how completely a great many people’s heads fell off at the very idea of paying that kind of money for a talented but occasionally inconsistent right-back with eye-catchingly good recovery pace.

It was a Game’s Gone moment for many, yet it goes down as one of the shrewdest and most effective uses of £50m the Barclays has seen.

More recently you could look at Liverpool paying eye-watering prices for Alisson or Virgil van Dijk, or Arsenal’s nine-figure move for Declan Rice. All of those involved the buying club identifying a player they saw as the missing ingredient, the final piece in a constantly evolving puzzle.

They paid the price that required and none now looks like a waste of that money.

We’re not saying Elanga is as good as any of those players – although it would be fun if we did, wouldn’t it?

Just that if Newcastle have identified him as the man who can kick them forward in the area of the pitch where there exists the biggest potential for them to make such a leap, then it barely matters if he’s ‘overpriced’.

Because saying a player is overpriced invites an obvious question: Compared to what? Or who?

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