ESPN REPORTED THAT CLAUDIO BRAVO keeper from CLUB EL BARCA WILL TO ETIHAD STADIUM TO THE JOE HART WILL SELL THE SAME AS THE new coach Pep Guardiola FROM MANCHESTER CITY AT JOE HART peg PRICE NOT LESS THAN 30 MILLION POUNDS  

WELCOME TO PAUL LABILE POGBA 

Twenty years after Newcastle United paid £15 million ($23.4m at the time) to acquire Alan Shearer from Blackburn Rovers, an English club has again broken the world record transfer fee.

Paul Pogba's move from Juventus to Manchester United will cost at least six times that, which is quite an increase over two decades. Because there's very little transparency in football, it's tough to put an exact number on what United paid for his services once you factor in agent commissions, which often get spread over the life of the contract. Different folks are putting different numbers out there, some include commissions, some do not (which, in this case, is particularly disingenuous). What's not in question is that it's a huge amount and a world record fee.

The commissions involved -- which according to multiple sources were shared, albeit not equally, and are far and away the highest ever paid -- are a sign of the times. The deal itself, especially when juxtaposed with Shearer two decades ago, is a sign of where the sport is going and where it's been.

When Shearer moved, Newcastle United would have looked to recoup the fee primarily from ticket sales, merchandise and prize money for finishing near the top of the league. Today, Manchester United will help pay for Pogba with an array of additional revenue streams that either didn't exist or were insignificant in the mid-1990s: global broadcast deals, off-season tours and the monetization of his image.

That's significant too, because at this level footballers are also walking billboards to which sponsors attach themselves. When, like NASCAR drivers, they get to race on one of the biggest, most popular racetracks (the Premier League) for one of the biggest, most popular teams (Manchester United), you get a natural multiplier effect.

What's more, Pogba has a commercial appeal that is rare. The game's iconic players -- Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, Zlatan Ibrahimovic (Pogba's new teammate) -- are around 30 or older. Other than Neymar, you won't find another player under the age of 28 who comes close to Pogba's global oomph. He's 23, speaks four languages, is fun to watch, smiles a lot, has zany hairstyles and is engaging in front of the cameras. He also happens to be one of the very best players in the world. And he'll be treading the biggest stage of all for the foreseeable future. That alone makes a transfer fee skyrocket.

Sources have told ESPN FC that Man United have agreed a fee for Paul Pogba.

The other aspect that sets him apart is that he's a central midfielder. Not an attacking No. 10 virtuoso, not an electrifying winger, but a big man with little man skills patrolling the middle of the park. Simply put, it's not a glamour position. Scan the list of the most expensive players ever and you get way, way down into the late 20s (Cesc Fabregas) before you find guys who played a similar role.

Maybe that's why a Manchester United legend like Paul Scholes questioned the fee. He suggested that, for that kind of cash, you expect to see at least 50 goals a year. It was an odd thing to hear, not least because Scholes himself was a box-to-box midfielder who never scored more than 20 goals in a single season. Yet, if Pogba can give you 10 seasons with the kind of productivity Scholes offered at his peak, you'd feel United would be more than happy.

That said, in many ways Pogba -- even after five seasons of top-flight football -- is still a piece of clay and definitions get somewhat reductive. You look at his creativity and range of passing and imagine him as an Andrea Pirlo or Xavi type deep-lying playmaker. You look at his size and strength, coupled with his close control and dribbling ability, and you imagine the havoc he would wreak in the hole behind the strikers. And you look at his long-limbed gallops and ballistics ability running into the box and picture him as a two-way midfielder, deployed on the inside-left of a midfield three (which is where he mostly played last year.)

The challenge for Manchester United boss Jose Mourinho is to find the best place for him to thrive and, in some ways, it's going to be a soft landing. Pogba's versatility means he can be slotted into various roles and the fact that, at least in the first season, the spotlight will be shared with Ibrahimovic and Mourinho himself -- two guys who attract attention wherever they rock up -- may make it easier for him to settle. So, too, will be the fact that he spent three seasons at United as a youngster.

Are there risks?

Of course there are. It doesn't matter how wealthy you are as a club, when you spend money on someone, it is money that you're not spending on someone else. There's an opportunity cost and there will be a huge amount tied up in Pogba.

Paul Pogba returns to Manchester United a much better player and under much greater scrutiny.

But all this is mitigated by the fact that you can get a good decade out of him. Or, if he doesn't live up to expectations, you sell him with a very good chance you'll get a big chunk of your money back. Just as United did with Angel Di Maria a few years ago, it's a very safe bet that Paris Saint-Germain, which also happens to be his hometown club, would happily spend big on Pogba.

There are associated risks for Pogba, too. United are not in the Champions League this season and, given the depth of competition in the Premier League, it's not guaranteed that they'll be back in 2017-18. Any team Ibrahimovic is on tends to be built around him -- that's what happens when you're bigger, stronger and more talented than everyone else -- and that means Pogba will have to adapt more than you'd expect the world's most expensive player to have to adapt. (Though, as I wrote above, there's a silver lining to this as well.)

There has clearly been a paradigm shift in transfer fees over the past 20 years, one that is probably not explained only by booming media rights and commercial income. Pogba's fee embodies this. But relative to many other deals done in these past three years by United's executive vice-chairman Ed Woodward -- who has spent a fortune in fees, wages and agent commissions and, before this summer, had just one nailed on 2016-17 starter to show for it: Antony Martial -- this one makes sense.

There are many chapters yet to write in the tale of Paul Labile Pogba. The next ones, maybe all the remaining ones, will be written in red.

Gabriele Marcotti is a columnist for ESPN FC,

#RE-UNITED POGBACK

     HISTORY OF A MANCHESTER UNITED 

Formed: 1878
Previous names: Newton Heath LYR FC
Admitted to Football League: 1892
European Cup/Champions League: 1967-68, 1998-99, 2007-08
European Cup Winners' Cup: 1990-91
Intercontinental Cup winners: 1999
FIFA Club World Cup 2008
UEFA Super Cup: 1991
First Division and Premier League: 19
Second Division 2
FA Cup: 11
League Cup: 4

Manchester United are an English club in name and a global club in nature. They were the first English side to play in the European Cup and the first side to win it, and they are the only English side to have become world club champions. In addition, the Munich Air Disaster of 1958, which wiped out one of football's great young sides, changed the club indelibly.

The club was founded in 1878 as Newton Heath LYR Football Club by workers at the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Depot. They played in the Football League for the first time in 1892, but were relegated two years later. The club became Manchester United in 1902, when a group of local businessmen took over. It was then that they adopted the red shirt for which United would become known.

The new club won their first league championships under Ernest Mangnall in 1908 and 1911, adding their first FA Cup in 1909. Mangnall left to join Manchester City in 1911, however, and there would be no more major honours until after the Second World War.

In that time United had three different spells in Division Two, before promotion in 1938 led to an extended spell in the top flight. The key to that was the appointment of the visionary Matt Busby in 1945. Busby reshaped the club, placing complete faith in a youth policy that would prove astonishingly successful. United won the FA Cup in 1948 and were runners up in the league in three consecutive seasons from 1947 to 1949; then, in 1952, Busby won United's first title for 41 years.

The team that won the league in 1956 became known as the "Busby Babes", due to a remarkable average age of 22. It included Duncan Edwards, an imperious wing half, and two relentless goalscorers in Tommy Taylor and Dennis Viollet. They regained the title the following season, having already become the first English side to play in the European Cup, with Busby standing firm despite pressure to withdraw from the Football League. United thrashed Anderlecht 10-0 in their first home match, and reached the semi-finals before losing to Real Madrid.

A year later, the team were on the way home after victory against Red Star Belgrade in the quarter-finals when a plane crash in Munich claimed 23 lives, eight of them players: Roger Byrne, Eddie Colman, Duncan Edwards, Mark Jones, Billy Whelan, Tommy Taylor, David Pegg and Geoff Bent.

Busby survived the crash and, after a makeshift side lost the FA Cup final to Bolton later in 1958, he built a second great side in the early Sixties, based around the Holy Trinity of Bobby Charlton, George Best and Denis Law. United won the FA Cup in 1963 and the championship in both 1965 and 1967; Busby's journey was complete with a poignant victory in the European Cup final of 1968. United beat Benfica 4-1 in extra-time with Wembley, with two of the goals scored by Charlton, who had survived the crash 10 years earlier.

When Busby resigned in 1969, United went into freefall. After just avoiding relegation in 1974 they went down a year later; although they were doomed anyway, the fact that Law - now playing for Manchester City - scored the winning goal against them at Old Trafford on the day they were relegated carried the cruellest symbolism.

United won Division Two at the first attempt, but at the highest level the swaggering brand of football they played under Tommy Docherty was more conducive to cup success. They lost unexpectedly to Division Two Southampton in the 1976 FA Cup final, and denied Liverpool a Treble by beating them 2-1 at Wembley a year later. Docherty was sacked shortly after that FA Cup triumph, following an affair with the physiotherapist's wife; his replacement, Dave Sexton, was more cautious, and many fans felt his style of play betrayed the club's traditions.

Sexton's four years included runners-up places in the league and FA Cup, but he was sacked in 1981 despite winning his last seven matches. His replacement, Ron Atkinson, took United back to the Seventies and the Docherty era. With an emphasis on attacking football and width, and a British record purchase of the remarkable Bryan Robson, United enjoyed five memorable years under Atkinson. They won the FA Cup in 1983 and 1985 - the latter after Kevin Moran was the first man to be sent off in the FA Cup final - but Atkinson was unable to end the long wait for a league title, and was replaced by Alex Ferguson in November 1986.

It is hard to imagine now, but Ferguson's first few years at Old Trafford were difficult in the extreme. United finished 11th, 2nd, 11th and 13th in his first four seasons, and only an FA Cup victory in 1990 provided some respite. Ferguson never looked back from that success: it was the first of 25 major trophies that he would win over the next 20 years, including 11 league titles.

United beat Barcelona to win the Cup Winners' Cup in 1991, yet there was only one prize they really wanted: a first championship since 1967. It finally arrived in 1993, the first season of the Premier League, and was catalysed by the mid-season signing of the majestic Eric Cantona from then-champions Leeds.

The club's first Double was secured in 1994, with Cantona and another outstanding crop of young players winning another in 1996. By now, Ferguson and United had a new Everest: the European Cup. They reached the promised land on May 26, 1999 - what would have been Sir Matt Busby's 90th birthday - when they beat Bayern Munich 2-1 in an astonishing finish, with United scoring twice in injury time. With another Double already in the bag, United thus became the first English side to win the Treble. Later in the year they beat Palmeiras to become world champions.

United went on to win three consecutive league titles in a row from 1999 to 2001 and, despite the considerable turmoil caused by the controversial takeover of the Glazer family in 2005, that feat was repeated by a new generation between 2007 and 2009. They also added United's third European Cup, beating Chelsea on penalties in an impossibly dramatic final in Moscow, while the 2009 title took United to 18 league titles, level with their great rivals Liverpool. A 19th title eluded them in 2009-10 but, the feat was overcome in 2010-11 as they finished the season nine points clear of Chelsea.

For the first time in a long while, though, they did not win a trophy the following season; losing out on goal difference to rivals City on the last day of the campaign as Roberto Mancini's men scored twice in stoppage time to deny them