What you have to understand is that Diego Costa never had a home in the sport before Atlético Madrid. He didn’t play anything like organized soccer—wasn’t even coached—until the age of 15, when he joined Barcelona Esportiva Capela in São Paulo. He signed with Atleti at 18 in 2007, and he didn’t stick. They loaned him to Celta Vigo, Albacete, Valladolid, and Rayo Vallecano. He missed most of the 2011-12 season with a knee injury. He didn’t crack the squad’s rotation until the 2012-13 season, when Cholo Simeone used him as a workhorse second striker behind Radamel Falcao. It was a long road toward the year when he scored 36 goals, won La Liga and barely lost the Champions League with Atleti. The crowds in Spain hated him—serenaded him: Diego Costa, Diego Costa, Diego Costa, you son of a bitch!—which was how he knew he’d arrived somewhere, and that somewhere happened to be the heart of Madrid along the Manzanares River.

So that’s what Atético Madrid means to Diego Costa. It makes sense he’d want to go back. But when Atleti came in with a sizable bid over the summer, Antonio Conte told Costa he was staying put. That’s usually that at a club as well-resourced as Chelsea. If they don’t want to sell a player, they don’t. There have been persistent murmurings that Atleti might try to nab Costa again, but they’re currently under a transfer ban that’s likely to stretch into next summer. They could buy Costa, theoretically, but they wouldn’t be able to play him until January 2018, so the point is moot.

The reason Atleti were able to make Chelsea a decent offer for Costa six months ago was that they sold Jackson Martinez, a complete flop, to Guangzhou Evergrande for $45 million last winter. Over the past year, Chinese clubs have come in for Europe and South America’s overpriced flotsam. Hulk joined Shanghai SIPG from Zenit for $60 million and Chelsea recently sold Oscar, who could hardly get a game, to the same club for $64 million. Roma have dumped Gervinho on Hebei China Fortune for $19 million and Inter offloaded Fredy Guarín to Shanghai Shenhua for $12 million. China has been an ATM for the rest of the soccer-playing world, dispensing outsize transfer fees for players clubs don’t want anymore and paying silly wages—Carlos Tevez is reportedly making $755,000 per week at Shanghai Shenhua—to washed up stars.

This lunkheaded profligacy has made the Chinese Super League a punchline. It’s like a wealthier, state-supported MLS: chasing legitimacy by throwing money at big names. In other words, its clubs haven’t been a genuine threat to poach talent from Europe’s best. If Real Madrid don’t want to, say, ship Toni Kroos to Guangzhou, they don’t have to, because they don’t need the money and Kroos likes playing in La Liga and the Champions League. As Arjen Robben put it upon re-signing with Bayern Munich: “A transfer to China [is] something else entirely. That is basically acknowledging your career is over. I want to keep playing at the highest level as long as possible.” The prevailing opinion on China’s prodigious cash-splashing is that it’s merely cannons thundering in the distance. They’ll buy from the fringes of Europe, but we won’t see Paul Pogba in Shanghai anytime soon.

And yet the cacophony draws closer. Costa got into a furious training ground argument with Conte last week that saw him dropped from the team for a weekend match against Leicester City. This is as much as we know for sure because the European sports press tends to pass off speculation and exaggeration as fact, but if we can count on The Guardian, which we typically can, the spat was about a massive transfer offer from Tianjin Quanjian’s, whose owner Shu Yuhui has since confirmed his club has approached Chelsea about purchasing Costa. Conte hasn’t said anything about the deal to reporters, unconvincingly claiming Costa was left out of the Leicester match because of a back injury.

There’s definitely some truth here, but it’s difficult to differentiate from rumor. Did Tianjin Quanjian make an offer that persuaded Costa, but not Chelsea? Are Chelsea holding out for an even more lucrative fee? Is Costa using the Chinese to leverage a pay raise? Is he sowing discontent to try to force a move back to Atlético Madrid on the off chance their transfer ban gets lifted this summer? As ever, the various motivations involved are hidden and what’s said in private stays there. We know that whatever’s going on, it’s enough to pitch Antonio Conte into a screaming fit, but then he’s a man whose emotional spectrum is mostly different shades of rage. 

The specifics of Diego Costa’s situation aside, Tianjin Quanjian’s interest poses an interesting question. Europe’s giants are more than happy to sell off their spare parts to the Far East at crazy markups, but what happens when China comes for the players they want to keep? Shu Yuhui says his club have also made bids for Karim Benzema, Edinson Cavani, and Radamel Falcao. Benzema’s having a down year, Falcao’s only just now shimmering through a minor renaissance after a few seasons of injury-induced struggle, and Cavani can’t seem to convince the world he’s one of its very best strikers no matter what he does, but these guys are undeniably a cut above the Oscars and the Hulks. China’s getting better taste in talent.

The prevailing opinion probably still holds. Europe’s soccer hegemony isn’t in danger. You could stick Leo Messi on a Chinese club and most people still wouldn’t watch. Fans care about the EPL, La Liga, the Bundesliga, et al. because of the tens of great players and hundred of very good players who play in those leagues. It’s the totality of the skill and athleticism that makes them compelling, and it’s not as if China’s going to start importing entire clubs. No one has that kind of money and the Chinese Super League has rules about its members needing to be stocked overwhelmingly with domestic players. Their broader aim seems to be increasing people’s interest in the sport and building a soccer infrastructure so that the country begins to produce its own stars.

In the meantime, though, Chinese clubs are showing they might be able to make trouble for Europe’s titans in certain respects. If they won’t ever be able to compete with Bayern Munich and Chelsea and Barcelona, they can at least tempt executives with absurd transfer offers and players with astronomical salaries. If Karim Benzema didn’t play for Real Madrid, nearly every other club in Europe would have him. Perhaps China can take a player of that caliber off the market, impoverish the talent pool ever so slightly. As of yet, that hasn’t happened. The huge numbers and the talk of agents hopping cross-continental flights—it’s all noise, still. But it’s as loud as it has ever been, and it’s not going away.