Arsenal may or may not be operating on a restricted budget but whatever the truth around the £40m claims, paying £15m for a season-long loan deal seems like a lot of money, so what’s going on?

At first glance, £15m for a season for a player who has no resale value whatsoever seems excessive. But if we imagine that Arsenal signed Dani Ceballos on a four-year deal and we amortize the hell out of this, that would value him at £60m which is not unreasonable for a talented Spanish 22-year-old in this market.

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With three years left on his current Real Madrid contract, £15m for a season values him at £45m.

Imagine then, if you will, that we owned Ceballos and he was entering into the last year of his contract. His value would probably be around the £15m mark, perhaps more, if we were trying to sell him.

On that basis, the £15m figure doesn’t seem unreasonable at all.

Some reports claim this is a ‘disproportionate’ amount while others will surely use it as a sign of Arsenal’s desperation.

It certainly seems like it could be both those things on the surface.

But spend just 30 seconds thinking about it in a summer that has already seen Frenkie de Jong (22) move for £67.5m, Rodri (23) for £63m, and Tanguy Ndombele (22) for £54m and it doesn’t seem like that much at all.

Leaving all that aside, however, it looks like the £15m figure first came from The S*n who include his wages in that figure. If we assume Arsenal are matching Ceballos’s Real Madrid wages then they are paying him £30pw or £1.56m a year.

That still leaves a quite hefty £13.5m loan fee.