Farewell then, the Duck. It has been … well, it has not been anything much really. Puzzling perhaps. Expensive certainly. Inexplicable for sure. The suggestion this week that Alexandre Pato may be leaving Chelsea before his contract expires in the summer did at least raise some interesting metaphysical questions.

Is it really possible to say you’re leaving when, by any reasonable standard, you never actually arrived in the first place? By the same token, is a duck-shaped absence actually a duck at all or simply an outline, a void, the condition of not being duck?

What does seem certain is Pato will now take his place on the list of worst Premier League signings ever made. Before Saturday’s game against West Ham his entire existence as a Chelsea player adds up to a series of payments into a bank account, zero minutes on the pitch, and some time spent sitting around looking mildly interested in a club tracksuit while various pressed men filled in as emergency centre-forwards and Chelsea’s chief back-up striker in an actual Champions League knockout stage second leg was Bertrand Traoré, a tyro with 13 minutes’ previous experience in the competition.

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As Pato rides off towards other sunsets, other burdensome sinecures, it might be tempting to dismiss the entire episode as another note of bafflement in a rancourous, wasteful season. And yet there is something so odd here, so many associated force fields and interests it is probably worth unpicking a little. Pato: The Man Who Wasn’t There is a story without answers, or rather with only two possible answers, neither of which make much sense. In the words of the great George Costanza, this thing’s like an onion. The more layers you peel away, the more it stinks.

The first and most obviously incorrect interpretation is the one punted about by the kind of misguided conspiracy theorists who believe European football is overly influenced by agents shuffling players between clubs. With this in mind the person we should feel most sorry for here is Pato’s friend and aide, the oft-maligned Kia Joorabchian, who presumably believed in good faith that Pato was a purely footballing first-team prospect at Chelsea.

It is certainly a wonderful show of faith in his man given Pato has been a talent in turnaround for years now, a cautionary tale of injuries, rushed comebacks and general gallivanting. In Milan, Pato had married Sthefany, shacked up with Barbara and dated Miss Multiverse, all the while scoring one league goal in two in-out seasons. “We are praying day and night hoping to sell Pato,” the president of Corinthians said last year. By which stage Pato looked almost a parody of the ruinously overpriced celebrity signing. To the extent that as late as last October it was being suggested “signing the Duck” could be a handy stand-in for the phrase “jumping the shark”, a signifier of endings, collapse, a decisive losing of the plot.

And then, amazingly, Chelsea signed the Duck. Yes! The actual Premier League champions! A club still in the last 16 of the Champions League and in genuine need of a goalscorer. Since when it has been too easy for the more cynical observers to see the entire episode as a product of outside influence, the desire to cosy up to those who govern the game of procurement and deal-making. In this scenario a player such as Pato can become a counterpoint to wider dealings, to be parked here and there, allowed to run down favourably, the footballing equivalent of a basket of sub-prime mortgages.

Whereas in fact Joorabchian, and others like him, are simply a means of doing business in a complicated world. Such as, for example, the sensational £25m deal to sell Ramires to the Chinese club Jiangsu Suning the day after Pato arrived. This is how football works, a long game of contacts and trusted associates. What business could function without them?

At the end of which the only remaining explanation for the Pato interlude is that it was simply bad judgment, that the club genuinely believed it had a fit and ready first-team striker. This was just an everyday howler – and one of a few recently.

Since October 2014 Chelsea have spent upwards of £100m on Loïc Rémy, Radamel Falcao, Nathan, Juan Cuadrado, Danilo Pantic, Asmir Begovic, Baba Rahman, Pedro, Papy Djilobodji, Michael Hector and Pato, a candidate for most scattergun 18-month spending splurge in the history of all football everywhere. Chuck in 31 loan players, £100m of talent orbiting the club like dislocated souls, a zombie-swarm of 60 first-team players waiting to greet Antonio Conte on his first day. It is tempting to wonder what the plan really is here.

Some would say this objection misunderstands how big clubs work now, the margin for natural wastage that is built in to the model. Imagine Chelsea as a small business, a small carwash or a small laundry and yes, every revenue stream, every payment coming in and out will be rigorously assessed, required to justify its outlay. But picture Chelsea as they really are, a much larger business – a much bigger carwash, a much bigger laundrette – and there will naturally be waste, losses, expenses written off and swallowed up by greater gains just as long as the product keeps coming.

Perhaps this state of apparent confusion is best seen as a kind of cultural contrast. The oddest part of Chelsea’s muddle of methods and strategies is that the club is owned by one man, restrained only by the limits of his sporting ambition. And yet somehow what has emerged is to a degree a very Russian way of operating: opaque, multilayered, a place where power flows down but is then filtered between competing layers, a revolving court of interested parties.

The wheels keep turning. Ducks land in the pool, stay a while, fly away. The whole vast, clanking machine keeps ploughing on into other turns, other plans, other clogged and tangled versions of the future.