John Terry: captain, leader, legend … and head coach of Ape Kids Club FC

As the transfer window enters its endgame there has been a familiar sub-plot over the last few days, another chapter in the ballad of Ousmane Dembélé.

This is the strangest of sporting lives. Dembélé is only 24. He joined Barcelona for £96m as long ago as August 2017, one of several deals that were steroid-fed by the state of Qatar’s inflationary lust for Neymar.

In the years since Dembélé has essentially become a prisoner of money. Barcelona can’t afford to keep him. Nobody else wants him on those ruinous terms. His career has dissolved into a kind of gilded stasis, a thing that only really comes alive as the biannual sub-industry of failing to sell Ousmane Dembélé cranks into gear.

At the end of which he is no longer primarily a footballer, more a kind of sub-prime bond, a human debt-vehicle, too hot to hold, too hot to pass on.

Dembélé has become non-fungible: an asset whose value is circumscribed and non-transferable; and also a symbol, a token of Barcelona’s wild financial hubris. That journey inside the machine is complete. Here is a footballer who has literally become a non-fungible token.

And yes this is a roundabout way of getting on to John Terry and the strange affair of the Ape Kids Club, an entity that manages the amazing feat of being even weirder than it sounds on paper. Things kicked off on 19 January when Terry tweeted “Hi Guys Sorry to keep you all waiting but very excited to announce my signing with the AKFC!”. OK then! Except, Terry isn’t actually a signing. He’s listed as “co-founder” of this enterprise, which is basically a website that leverages football to sell generic computer drawings of cartoon primates to children.

Ape Kids Club currently has 112,000 Twitter followers plus a tonally strange,