He is the football equivalent of a penny share that you thought was too much of a punt for even the emerging markets part of your Isa portfolio.
Two years ago Andre Gray was struggling to hold down a regular starting place for Luton Town in the Conference. Twelve months ago, he was a week away from scoring his first goal in the Sky Bet Championship.
Yet on Friday, having spurned Bristol City’s advances and seen Hull City fail to solidify their interest, Burnley splashed out £9 million, but I’m told more like £6 million plus add-ons, for him and the goals that they hope will fire them straight back to the Barclays Premier League.
This is more than their entire spend when they were in the top tier and 12 to 18 times (depending on which figure you use) what Brentford paid for Gray last summer.
In recent years, the stretch from scoring goals in non-League football to doing so for the Championship’s most ambitious clubs and beyond has become a well-plodded path. In the most obvious cases from leagues hovering ominously above turning out for the Dog & Duck on a Sunday morning.
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Four years ago, Dwight Gayle had only just joined Dagenham & Redbridge from Stansted in the Essex Senior League, eight divisions below his present Premier League habitat with Crystal Palace.
Five years before that, Charlie Austin was turning out for Kintbury Rangers in Hellenic League Division One East, one division above Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Thames Valley and Wiltshire county level.
Yet nowadays not a day goes past where I do not start my day by reading about Gayle’s proposed second multimillion-pound move in as many years or who is willing to stump up the £15 million that Queens Park Rangers want for Austin (last week’s shortening of the odds on him making a switch to Manchester United is not as far-fetched as it sounds — Sir Alex Ferguson would have considered it).
By the time the transfer window shuts at 6pm a week tomorrow, there is every chance that English football’s nether regions will have seen the trio transformed into £30 million of striking talent.
All of which leaves me wondering just how many more are out there — rejected by the elite academies (or never picked up in the first place), dodging dog turds on the pitch, freezing in hellhole changing rooms, washing their own kits, playing for either fun, camaraderie or out of a sense of routine. Their fate rests in the hands of how much petrol a scout, slightly farther up football’s food chain, has in their car.
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Weekend three of the Football League campaign and the blunderbuss is ready to shot-blast a Championship manager. It took out 20 last season, so I am surprised we have had to wait this long.
I don’t know Gary Bowyer, the Blackburn Rovers manager, well. Such has been his quietening of the Ewood Park circus that was pockmarked by the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing during the era of Shebby Singh, the club’s former global adviser, that I had no reason to meet him until we previewed the new season together for BBC Radio 5 Live a month ago.
What I do know is that the club’s transfer embargo for a breach of Financial Fair Play regulations is not of his making. It was imposed for a failure to adjust to economic reality before his arrival in March 2013. But he is paying the price in terms of the asset-stripping of his best players to balance the books.
•Mark Clemmit is the features reporter on BBC One’s Football Focus, rounds up the Football League on BBC One’s Final Score, presents BT Sport’s coverage of the Vanarama National League and is a regular voice on BBC Radio 5 Live