When is enough, enough?

It makes you wonder whether a footballer, any footballer, is worth the staggering sums of money being bandied about, to play in China, contesting what is effectively a secondary league.

Indications are that Manchester United’s Wayne Rooney, currently not flavour of the month on coach Jose Mourinho’s menu despite his 119 England caps, being the national captain and holding the goalscoring record at Old Trafford, could command a mind-blowing £750 000-a-week if he secures a move to China – almost trebling his present salary.

Just to put that into some sort of perspective, the average Chinese wage earner makes a shade over £4 000 a year or 0.01% of Queen Elizabeth’s annual income.

Certainly that will keep him in deep fried prawns for a while. But like the bulk of the big earners in China, Rooney, a product of Liverpool’s Croxteth where even the local constabulary travel mobhanded, Rooney, at 31, is staring down the barrel of the end of his career.

But the drive by President Xi Jinping to turn 86th-ranked China into a world football power has raised the stakes for big names and massive paycheques.

Rooney is the same age as Italian Graziano Pelle, who moved to Chinese club Shandong Luneng from Southampton, although the £290 000 the striker’s bank account reflects each week only places him eighth in the global game’s earnings stakes, but well behind Barcelona’s fifth-placed earner Lionel Messi’s £336 000-per-week after tax or the £350 000-a-week Welsh wizard Gareth Bale – one rung higher on the payscale than the brilliant Argentinian – or the £365 000-a-week Cristiano Ronaldo picks up at Real Madrid.

But Messi, Bale and Ronaldo are outstripped by the £400 000 Shanghai SIPG’s Oscar has been earning since leaving Chelsea, and dwarfed by the £615 000-a-week the brooding Carlos Tevez is being paid by Shanghai Shenua, making him the current top dog.

It’s money beyond the realms of reason, and the European clubs are starting to feel the pressure rebounding back at them.

But as in any sphere of life, records are there to be broken.

And if the seeming impasse between Rooney and his club boss Mourinho becomes more intractable and cannot be repaired, the Chinese might just have decided that even the skies over the world’s most populous nation have no limit.