Barcelona poaches Liverpool's best players, Liverpool poaches Southampton's best players, and Southampton poaches the best players from smaller English and continental clubs....
...whether this is "fair" depends, as Obi Wan Kenobi says, on your point of view.
Inflation has run wild, of course. Average players cost tens of millions of pounds, proven "good" players are rarely available for less than 30-40 million, and the prices of "star" players have reached truly interstellar levels. There is talk that the world's first billion-pound player has already been born.
In this stage of the Bosman era keeping a player has become virtually impossible - the best you can do is make a lot of money on him and poach another, less-wealthy team's best player as a replacement. Richer teams exploit smaller teams all the way down the football pyramid and across the globe.
Contracts exist only to inflate transfer fees, rather than to realistically define length of tenure at a club.
Liverpool badly need a better centerback, and their willingness to spend this fee reflects that, though they do seem to have put all their eggs in one basket with van Dijk. And he will still be playing in front of Mignolet or Karius, neither of whom cut the mustard given where Klopp wants to be finishing.
