Memo to England's Premier League.

It might just make sense to come up with some kind of standardised player contract everyone can understand. Either that or just make them all public so we can all draw our own conclusions.

Arsenal bid £40,000,001 for Luis Suarez, believing this entitles them to enter direct negotiations with the striker – £40 million was, after all, the widely reported "trigger" at which some kind of release clause would be activated in the Uruguayan's Liverpool contract.

"Not so fast!" say the folks at Anfield. Without explaining what the clause is, what it actually triggers or whether it even exists, they simply turned down Arsenal's bid and refused to allow them to have any talks with Suarez.

Who's right? Who knows? The latest indication is that it's down to the "interpretation" of the clause. Arsenal – and Suarez's people –believe it's a release clause, a fee at which Liverpool must sell. Liverpool evidently believe it's something entirely different.

You'd need to see the contract to know for sure. Or actually no, you probably still wouldn't know because it's likely to be written in legalese. By lawyers, for lawyers, the type of mumbo-jumbo designed to generate more billable hours and further confusion.

It's a basic common sense thing that applies to all agreements everywhere. When you shake on it, make sure both you and the other party are 100% certain what the deal actually is. Evidently this did not happen here. You only hope for Liverpool's sake that whoever drew up the contract wasn't the same genius who gave them such idiotic legal advice during the Suarez-Evra case.

Arsenal did not bid £40,000,001 because Arsene Wenger likes odd numbers. They genuinely believed it would release the player. Equally, it's safe to assume Suarez's camp invited the bid because they thought it would actually release him, possibly to eventually go to Real Madrid – his preferred destination – but that is another story. Now the whole affair could potentially go to a transfer tribunal. What joy! More billable hours for the lawyers!

If the Premier League don't see this as embarrassing, well, they should. Laissez-faire is great but there is a limit of common sense and clarity.

All that aside, a few things seem obvious. If Suarez doesn't want to be at Liverpool, the club are taking a huge risk in keeping him there. A year from now, they may not get anywhere near £40m. Not to mention the fact he could throw an almighty strop that would only depress his value further.

From Arsenal's perspective, it's a radical departure from the Wenger way, which, given how little silverware it has delivered of late, is not necessarily a bad thing. But Wenger has never been in the market for a player of Suarez's profile – veteran in mid-career, third most expensive signing in Premier League history – and you wonder if this isn't the football equivalent of a midlife crisis-fuelled Harley Davidson purchase.

You build the team for Olivier Giroud, then you chuck out the blueprint 10 months later and buy an entirely different striker. Hardly ideal long-term planning.

Then there's Suarez himself. Apart from Champions League football, what would a move to the Emirates give him that he doesn't already have at Anfield?

Weigh that up against the further loss of credibility (wasn't the whole problem that he was "persecuted" by the English press?), taking his cartoon villain schtick to another level, and it's obvious it is hardly worth it.

You can only guess this is Suarez's way – or his agent's way – of engineering the move he really wants, to the Bernabeu, and that Arsenal have somehow become pawns in all this.

Oh, and by the way, signing Suarez would mean paying him the £200,000 a week they wouldn't give Robin Van Persie a year ago, begging the question of whether it wouldn't have been better to simply keep the Dutchman and save themselves a boatload of money.

The next step? Suarez would have to demand a transfer, and it could yet get to that stage. But if he's going to do that, you can only assume it will be with the intention of moving to Madrid, rather than North London.

If Gerardo "Tata" Martino does the business at Barcelona, you can throw a lot of received conventional wisdom out the window. At first glance, the choice of manager drafted in to replace Tito Vilanova, who was forced to step down after discovering he needed more aggressive treatment for throat cancer, looks somewhere between a roll of the dice and thinking way too far outside the box.

Martino arrives fresh from winning the Argentine title with Newell's Old Boys and taking them, after a stunning turnaround, to the semi-finals of the Copa Libertadores. Which is great, but his cv beyond that is somewhat ho-hum. He won four league titles... all of them in Paraguay. Apart from his year at Newell's, he hasn't actually managed a club side – let alone one of this magnitude – since 2006, when he was appointed coach of Paraguay. Most of all, he's an outsider at a club that has peddled a very distinct in-house brand for the best part of the past decade.

Some will say he's a disciple of Marcelo Bielsa, the unconventional coaching savant and hipster favourite, and therefore a natural for Barcelona. But while there are parallels between Bielsa and Pep Guardiola – the pressing and possession – there are also vast differences. And what sticks out most about Martino is that, unlike Bielsa, his teams score very few goals.

You can't help but feel that Lionel Messi – who, like Martino, hails from Rosario – had a hand in this appointment. And you wonder if Barca aren't being a little too clever here. After all, he won't just have to win, he'll have to adapt to a new continent, navigate the aftermath of one of the most turbulent summers in recent Camp Nou history and somehow integrate Neymar alongside Messi.

If Martino is a success, a whole lot of accepted wisdom will have to be revisited. Starting with the notion that a big club needs a big name, pedigreed manager with a massive long-term contract and sweeping powers.