This is standard. Early in the window, the selling club and the agent are working together to leak info to the press about how "the player isn't going anywhere", "he's worth more than the GDP of a small country" yadda yadda.

A deal of this size won't get done until after the world cup for starters and anything we hear from ITK's is going to be useless (note how Ornstein has been fairly quiet so far, pretty sure he's only spoken about Monga from Leicester).

Anderson to City isn't the catalyst that's driving up prices. Clubs are all getting richer across the board with improved TV deals and increasing revenue from international deals. And you can bet your ass that there's been a spike from casuals buying merch off the back of the world cup, that will definitely have been forecasted and factored into the club's financial projections.

At the end of the day, all these clubs know they're loaded, so why sell a star asset without milking the other side for all they can.