People fail to appreciate that disposing of players in this way could very well be part of our business model. Being an effective businessman is about making dispassionate and clinical decisions about assets that once were central to your business, but now are failing to deliver - a state of play that is likely to continue.
In those circumstances, you cut loose and accept that you're sometimes going to take an enormous hit. With the money now at the top of the English game, there's two ways of dealing with unwanted players; be lazy or ruthless about it. We've chosen the latter, which is definitely the lesser of the two evils. Things change in football; players sometimes don't work out, or go off the boil for a wide number of factors, which sometimes are nothing to do with what occurs on the pitch. It's always been the same in football, and as long as human beings remain the eternal constant in the equation, it's never going to change.
