The word 'transfer' appears twice in Declan Rice's diplomatically worded statement regarding his switch of international allegiance.
No money has changed hands, but that is how it feels. Like a club deal, as if a promising young player has enhanced his career prospects with a move. Rice will no doubt do that one day when he leaves West Ham, too, but international football is supposed to be different.
Rice will walk into Gareth Southgate's England squad, and quite possibly his team. He is the player Southgate has been missing, the central defensive midfielder with world-class potential.
Declan Rice has decided to pledge his international allegiance to England over Ireland
Given the evidence of his first Premier League season, he could be better there than Jordan Henderson or Eric Dier.
He breaks up play, reads the game intelligently, passes well; 86 per cent accuracy for West Ham this season, if not with huge ambition as yet. He has excelled this season against the elite teams. He could be the missing link.
The terseness of Mick McCarthy's statement suggests the Republic of Ireland manager feels let down, but whose fault is that? They have been gaming the system for many years now but are beginning to experience the backlash.
Rice is just the latest of their young English-born recruits to desert after Jack Grealish and Michael Keane. The department set up to tempt teenagers with Irish heritage are talent catchers, not talent keepers.
Ireland have been used much like an academy, to give these players international experience before their heads are turned by a better offer.
How Rice may look wearing an England shirt after he pledged allegiance to the Three Lions
Rice performed somersaults to avoid offending the nation of his grandparents but this drama wasn't his fault. If Ireland insist on making teenagers choose nationalities before they have picked their GCSE subjects, what do they expect?
Footballers' grannies were once used to give opportunity to those who were stuck in a dead end. It was perfectly obvious that Maidstone-born Andy Townsend wasn't going to be picked by England when he elected to become Irish at 25. It was the only way he could play international football. That wasn't necessarily true of Rice.
Townsend suffered an absence of choice until Ireland came along, Rice was simply offered more choices. It is the difference between opportunity and opportunism.
Mark O'Toole is the Football Association of Ireland's most successful English-based scout with a specific remit to monitor those with dual nationality. He gets in early, he maintains contact outside international duty, he is very good at his job.
Rice has been involved with Ireland since the Under 16 age group and in 2017 felt committed enough to refer to O'Toole as a 'father figure'.
So, what happened? Success happened. Rice has been outstanding in his first Premier League season and intelligent voices have been predicting an elite future. With international rules so fluid and open to exploitation, young players can now not only move to a bigger club, but a bigger country.
Rice has established himself as one of the most promising young players in the Premier League
Rice is English, as are his parents. He may have Gaelic allegiances culturally but if Ireland use nationality as a convenience, it can hardly be surprising when players do, too.
There will be some in McCarthy's squad who are wedded to green but Rice will not feel that way. His international career has been the product of opportunism, so why would he not think opportunistically, too?
Those still smarting at his decision compare Rice to Grealish and Keane: one still waiting for an international debut, the other with just five full England caps. They are different entirely. Grealish is still an under-21 player, Keane has never been a leading centre back in England — and neither were ever among the outstanding performers in a season.
Rice is a level up again. He is almost certainly West Ham's Player of the Year and a contender for the PFA Young Player, too. He operates in a position in which Southgate is short. The career path is right there for him.
Even if it wasn't, he is English. It is Ireland that were the predators here, not Rice the turncoat.
Show Mike the money, AmandaAmanda Staveley has told a newspaper in Abu Dhabi that her consortium is still interested in Newcastle.
Strange that, because if it is true, the only person she needs to tell is Mike Ashley, the owner, because his business is most definitely on the market.
Then she needs to come up with the money, of course, which is where these paper deals seem to fall down.
Amanda Staveley has told a newspaper her consortium is still interested in Newcastle
Fair play to Graeme Souness. He called it right on Paul Pogba. January 14, against Tottenham, Pogba got away with a tackle on Dele Alli that Souness insisted should have seen red. Quite a few — Jamie Redknapp, and one here, to name two — disagreed.
It was claimed Pogba was getting across the ball to protect it and caught Alli by accident. Until Tuesday night — when he did the same to Dani Alves and was rightly sent off.
The moral of this story? Never doubt Souness's knowledge of football's darker arts - but there were lessons all over in Manchester United's defeat by Paris Saint-Germain.
Certainly, any club facing United in the coming weeks will consider paying special attention to Pogba in midfield. Marquinhos did a quite magnificent job on him on Tuesday and by the end familiar flaws had resurfaced.
Paul Pogba was sent off for Manchester United late in their defeat to Paris Saint-Germain
Not only did Pogba not dominate the play as he has done in the Premier League in recent weeks, he had lost his head by the end.
Not all clubs have a player of Marquinhos's quality to stand guard but quite a few of the better ones — Chelsea, Liverpool, even Manchester City — do. Moussa Sissoko was carrying out that job well for Tottenham last month, too, and it was only after he went off injured that Pogba played the pass of the match to Marcus Rashford to win the game.
Equally interesting was Ole Gunnar Solskjaer's announcement that he could not help Alexis Sanchez recover his form
'I'm not the one,' Solskjaer said. 'I can't do anything. When he plays, he needs to
