A WISE old agent once said the best way to gauge the level of a new transfer market was to take what looked like the previous year’s most exaggerated fee and use it as the standard. In which case the starting unit for 2007 should be a “Michael Carrick”. Twelve months ago, a sum of about £18m for a midfielder with an ordinary goalscoring record raised eyebrows. Once Manchester United had won the Premiership, with goals and good input from their deepest midfield player, the fee stopped seeming outrageous.

United opened the new transfer season by paying about £17m to Bayern Munich for Owen Hargreaves, and it has set a number of dominoes falling quickly across Europe with Bayern becoming the busiest of the continent’s major clubs. The deposed German champions needed to act, having just completed their worst campaign this side of the millennium – fourth place in the Bundesliga, and no Champions League berth next season. Painful lessons had been learnt about the cost of dallying. Last summer, Bayern were beaten to Ruud van Nistelrooy by Real Madrid.

Last week they unveiled their alternative Van Nistelrooy, a 30-year-old proven goalscorer with international pedigree. He is Luca Toni, a former winner of the Golden Shoe and, provided he recovers fully from a metatarsal injury that restricted him last season, he is a good bet to continue the late bloom of a career that took off in his late twenties. Toni was a key part of Italy’s World Cup-winning side, and he cost Bayern a little more than £7m from Fiorentina.

The Hargreaves money, meanwhile, went more or less straight into the fee Bayern paid to Olympique Marseille for Franck Ribery, the France winger. Ribery is 24, should score goals and indeed excite the crowd at the Allianz Arena in a way Bayern failed to do very often over the past nine months. The £17m Marseille collect from Bayern matches the Bundesliga’s record payout, Borussia Dortmund’s splurge on Marcio Amoroso in 2001, when several spending records were set.

Some of this money may in turn flow back to England. With the sale of Ribery, Marseille have extra funds to prise Djibril Cisse away from Liverpool on a permanent basis. As for Bayern, their recruitment drive continues, as they chase German striker Miroslav Klose.

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