“… All six were pitched into the seller’s market — and welcome to it, whether you want to be there or not. Clubs spend endless hours formulating lists of targets they want to recruit, the footballers who improve a team, but maintaining the balance of budgets and dressing rooms is every bit as dependent on clubs ridding themselves of the ones they no longer need. Finances, tactics, personality clashes, fitness concerns; the motivation for getting shot of a player varies from case to case but the process has an identical goal: Find a taker and draw a line through the name, while saving yourselves as much money as possible. …”
The Athletic