A few years ago there was a vague attempt by people on the internet to replace the phrase “jumping the shark”, which describes the moment when something previously credible reaches a deflating point of no return, with the less catchy “nuking the fridge”. Nuking the fridge came from a scene at the start of Indiana Jones And The Crystal Skull where Indy survives a direct hit from an atomic bomb by hiding inside a refrigerator. In the film Jones emerges unscathed. Whereas in reality the grizzled academic-adventurer, played by 68-year-old Harrison Ford, would have been vaporised instantly, mangled to a pulp or perhaps liquefied into a grotesque human soup of molten flesh, bone, metal and plastic via a kind of bain-marie effect inside the fridge’s superheated lead lining.

Nuking the fridge didn’t really catch on. But jumping the shark is very much still out there, gamely refusing to die. Perhaps one day English football, which has always been good at minting new phrases, might even come up with something to replace it. Tossing the gilet. Sacking the doctor. Or as of this week an increasingly convincing candidate: Signing The Duck. Which, according to Alexandre Pato himself – or at least sources close to Alexandre Pato – appears to be a real possibility once the transfer window opens.

It is worth acknowledging straight away that Pato was, and perhaps could be again, a beautiful footballer, a thrillingly mobile one-man attacking swarm, the kind of once-in-a-generation teenager who looked like he could score any goal against any opponent in any game. Pato’s record with Milan, 63 goals in 150 games, is still good despite his final two injury-shredded seasons. He has been in good form on loan at São Paulo, scoring a screamer against Coritiba last week and generally looking like a 26-year-old superstar manqué in a state of finely-poised rehabilitation.

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In spite of which Corinthians are desperate to get rid of him. “We are praying day and night, hoping to sell Pato,” the club president, Roberto De Andrade, has said. At a time when he should be simply taking a breath, exploring once again the outer fringes of his own frazzled talent, Pato has instead become the footballing equivalent of a toxic financial product, too costly to keep, too costly to sell.

For the past year his £60,000–a-week wages have been split unsustainably between his two Brazilian clubs while those with a stake in the zombified corporate entity that is Pato Inc scrabble about trying find a way back into European football’s monied overclass. There has been no shortage of effort. To date Pato has been “linked” with Internazionale, Lazio, Queens Park Rangers, Tottenham Hotspur, Hull City, Sunderland, Arsenal, Manchester United and, as of this week, West Ham United and Barcelona.

None of which should come as any real surprise given that being linked with buying Pato has been a recurrent hobby for top tier European clubs since before his arrival at Milan in 2007 as one of the most coveted young players in the world.

Two years later Pato scored twice as Milan beat Real Madrid in the Bernabéu, careering about with that lovely, splay-footed sense of Tiggerish vigour, jinking sideways, head up, finding those unexpected patterns between the squares on the graph paper, all pure, irresistible energy. He won the Golden Boy, awarded by journalists to the best player in Europe under 21. Gazzetta dello Sport described him, memorably, as “the king of the future” on its front page.

In the event Pato has turned out to be something else too, another poster boy for the unhealthy relationship between Big Football and energetically commodified young talent. First came the injuries, 14 thigh and hamstring twangs over two years. Pato – which translates as Duck – blames Milan for making him play while he was unfit. Milan blamed an unexpected growth spurt plus a more predictable loss of focus. He married Sthefany, dated Débora (AKA Miss Multiverse 2013) and shacked up with the Milan boss, Barbara Berlusconi. Time passed. Pato stopped scoring. Corinthians offered a hilarious amount of money to take him to Brazil.

Back home for the World Cup – Pato’s World Cup, awarded the same year he moved to Milan – he was overlooked for the semi-immobile Fred who spent the tournament wandering around like a collection of pillows stuffed into a yellow shirt and painted with a rakish moustache. On loan at São Paulo, it seemed for a while like the Duck had pretty much nuked the fridge, signed the Duck.

And yet, this being football, there is always hope.

Pato’s loan contract runs to December, at which point he will become simply too hot to hold. He remains a terribly seductive talent, even if it is on the face of it hard to see how a mid-season move to the Premier League could do anyone any good. Not Pato himself, who would be asked to endure without any preliminaries a daunting mid-season uplift in physical intensity – the Scott Dann Factor, the Lee Cattermole Possibility – plus the trauma of a fourth team in three years.

The footballing romantic yearns for that improbable move to Barcelona, the linkup with Neymar in a kind of doomed time-tunnel dream Brazil 2014 forward lineup. At the same time signing the Duck, or rather panic-signing a recuperative mid-season Duck is such a Premier League thing to do it already feels oddly inevitable: confirmation once again that in English football money is there simply to be hurled, randomly at the most attractive object flashing past outside of the train window.

There is a point here about the general difficulty in identifying young talent and the meaninglessness of the numbers attached to it. Back in 2007, the Year of Pato, Anderson went to Manchester United for £30m. Arsène Wenger raved about Fran Merida, star of an Under-17 World Cup that also featured James Rodríguez, Eden Hazard and Toni Kroos. At times you wonder if the whole point of impossibly promising youthful talent is simply its impossible promise, the conspicuous, ruinous consumption, the illusory thrill of somehow owning the future ahead of time.

For Pato it has been a slightly wild eight year retreat. With patience and exactly the right sequence of choices there is still time to come again. For the Premier League signing him now would represent another admission that, for all the TV money we, the consumers provide, for all the fine words, the English top tier remains a kind of high intensity form of sporting pantomime.

How long would this convalescent Pato keep up Mauricio Pocchetino’s north London ‘gegenpressing’? What would he be at West Ham other than a piece of A-list bunting for the new stadium. As Jürgen Klopp keeps on muttering, in those oddly lucid moments where he suddenly just seems like a normal person wandered into the middle of a peculiar kind of mass hysteria, not everything in life is about buying and spending. The world may have seen the Premier League coming more than once. But there is still a chance to act a little more gently, to take a breath. We haven’t quite signed the Duck just yet.