It's not "madness", it just feels like madness. It's a market. It's not like we don't need top players to be a top, competitive football club, and it's not like top players are cheap - especially this window, it appears.
Also, Suarez's transfer price has nothing to do with his behavioural issues - our bid is similar to our bid for Higuain. It's to do with how he plays football. One might question whether someone with such poor conduct should be so hugely rewarded financially, but then one might question whether someone should be rewarded financially for playing football as well.
I get fucking sick of people who live and breathe in a world totally in the grip of the dynamics of neoliberal capitalism, who then profess a kind of eyebrows-up wowserish surprise when there's a price catastrophe or someone's profiteering, or they notice that everyone, absolutely everyone, is morally compromised by the principles of exchange by which we live. That's the system.
Finally, Suarez's behaviour, particularly his racism (whether it's heartfelt or pseudo-racist trolling) is appalling, but redemption should always be a possibility. There is an intersectional undertone of racism in the prevailing eagerness to attack him and describe him as an "animal" or a "cannibal" as well, in my opinion. Just as class and its geographical asymmetry in the UK inflect the attacks on Rooney, and a vocabulary of culturally loaded terms and symbols - "beast", "monster", "ape", bananas - expressing the persistent, occluded hierarchy of racial privilege is used to discuss black players.
Meanwhile Australia is paying through the nose to ship innocent refugees off its shores because they're brown, and alleged Smiths fan David Cameron is running an "immigrants go home" campaign to shore up the EDL vote. Sick, sad world ...
