Paul Pogba: Agent Raiola the true king of football, and United fans victims of a rotten revolution

The costs of being a football fan feeds into a wider narrative in Brexit Britain: a story of the rich not giving a toss about those less fortunate than themselves.

Exhibit one: the costliest season ticket for the finest view in the house at Old Trafford will set you back a whopping £950. Or it would have before all Manchester United’s 55,000 books in the 75,635-capacity stadium were apparently sold out to usher in the ‘Special One's' second coming in English football, after his farcical demise at Chelsea. Or the third coming at United: recall the beheadings of David ‘The Chosen One’ Moyes and 'King Louis' van Gaal; remember the clamour surrounding those guys, from optimistic pre-seasons past?

With a prime spot in the Sir Alex Ferguson stand going for just under a grand, the cheapest book is flogged for £532 in the Stretford End. To some people this might not seem like a heavy outlay; to others it will represent a vast chunk of monthly, perhaps even yearly, outgoings.

It matters not if you are struggling to make ends meet, if you are a working class United fan with threadbare memories of the pre-Fergie 1980s, of Big Ron, Tommy Doc and Dave Sexton, nobody at joints like United care. No more. "Watch it on TV if you can't afford it" is the message. "If you can't afford satellite TV, it's not our problem," is the second message.

All they care about is the largesse clamping itselt to sporting behomoth, not the dislocation of a club from its people, from the communities enveloping a stadium. Such local concepts are now stuck firmly in United's past.

The price you must pay to hope a Jose Mourinho side will "entertain" you in the forthcoming season is merely a small fraction of football’s rotten revolution. Everything in life sadly comes down to money: the haves and have mores have hijacked this working class sport to its eternal detriment.

United’s ability to name their price for tickets is obviously helped when they can show off the glistening figure of Paul Pogba for a fee hovering around £110m, a fee to which they can, and desperately want, to attach the moniker of the game's world record transfer.

Never before has any club ventured so far for one player. Real Madrid hold the previous two highest purchases in Cristiano Ronaldo and Gareth Bale, for £80m and £85m respectively. Kaka's move from AC Milan to Madrid for £56m in 2009 looks tinpot by comparison.

But United are financing this because it makes them feel more special than the ‘Special One’. It demonstrates outrageous financial muscle in a football world already pumped up by the fiscal steroids from television billions (worth around £8bn pre-Brexit) to England’s elite clubs.

Pogba’s fee is a grotesque sum of money however you try to justify it, but merely becomes more offensive when you deconstruct who is likely to benefit most from it when the goodies are handed out by United.

This is the club who have apparently forgotten what the value of money means in their desperation to return to the Fergie days - a period in time that have gone from United forever, never to be fished out of the Ship Canal.

Of course, the £110m that United are going to hand over for Pogba is not the whole, merely the lion's share. The devil's share is going elsewhere: to Mino Raiola, the 'super-agent' who brokered the deal, and whose fee of as much as £20m was apparently the final topic of discussions between United and Juventus.

It is merely a drop in the bucket for Mino, 48, who has earned an astonishing £250m - more than Lionel Messi's career earnings according to one report in Italy - from a cut of fees over the past 23 years from clients such as Pogba, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Robinho, Mario Balotelli and Pavel Nedved.

There will be no Pogba deal done if United don’t meet the demands of Mino, a kingmaker and the real king of football. Like that other legend in his own lunchtime Jorge Mendes, most notably advisor to Mourinho and Christiano Ronaldo, these are men who must have their bank balance bolstered before clubs can do business with their clients.

If you don't have talent, exploit it. Forget the notion that Pogba will soon be United’s property. He is owned by Mino, and what Mino wants Mino gets in a murky outerworld of agent fees.

The United chief executive Ed Woodward has become so haunted by transfers collapsing in seasons gone by in the form of Bale, Robert Lewandowski, Cesc Fabregas and Thiago Alcantara, this transfer is more about the message it sends out rather than the medicinal purposes it will provide to Mourinho’s squad.

The Pogba payment is such an act of lunacy that it is best illustrated when you wonder who else United could have signed without the self-indulgent level of largesse.

Do you think Pogba is a better player than N’Golo Kante, a figure signed by Chelsea from Leicester for £30m and described by Fergie as the Premier League's best midfielder last season? Most commentators would argue yes; but do you think he is worth £70m more than Kante?

Pogba’s marketing prospects, social media presence, weaves and dress sense inflate the price, and Raiola, a former pizza chef, can almost smell the desperation wafting from United as he prepares to devour the contractual antipasto.

Yet we have become so desensitized to such sums in the national sport that , resembling David Gest in his shades the other day, barely caused any reaction outside of Italy when his domestic Serie A record move from Napoli to Juvenus was concluded. Probably because we knew Pogba's plane ticket to Manchester was being sorted out by Mino, a figure party to football’s rotten revolution.

It involves handing over millions to undeserving figures with no genuine interest in the club while the club itself refuses to find the funds to ease the burden on fans who are viewed no better than proles. If United can find £20m for Mr Raiola, why can they not unearth a similar sum to subsidise people who were there before - and who will remain in Manchester long after Jose, Paul and Mino are gone. (Which experience suggests won't be for the long haul.)

If United can afford to pay £20m to an agent, they can afford to direct the same figures to make matches cheaper. There should be a willingness to help the supporter, but there won’t be. A £10 or £15 season ticket for 19 home league games would work out as £285, a much more accessible figure for United’s working class fans. If Mino’s £20m cut instead is spent on match tickets, United could make each league home match roughly £20 cheaper for every season ticket holder, for every single game.

(55,000 season tickets, 19 matches apiece, equates to 1,045,000 seats per season for season ticket holders. Giving fans a £20-a-match rebate would cost £20,090,000 - knocking £380 off the total cost of a season ticket. Raiola really is earning that much.)

When Pogba returns to United with his gleaming smile, United strip in hand, he will do so on the advice of his agent, a man key to his decision to depart these shores due to lack of first-team activity four years ago, and who has now arranged for United to hand over football's first nine-figure transfer fee for a player they let go for free at the time of Euro 2012.

Football does not adhere to any laws of logic. The United that Fergie inherited in 1986 was vastly different from the one he retired from in 2013. In only three years, this United is unrecognisable from Ferguson's time running the place. Its only nod to Fergie is making his stand host the most expensive seats in the club he built.

The Pogba transfer fee is a temple of doom, another indication of a sport that lies in moral ruins with no care for locals. They should probably rename Fergie’s ‘Theatre of Dreams’ Mourinho’s Madhouse. The lunatics have taken over the asylum.

The real losers remain poor fans, showing blind loyalty to a club who continue to know the cost of everything, but the value of nothing.