Amortization.
We owed him like 10m for one more year, which weighs heavily on the books. We "extended" him for one more year and that extension just took the 10m for 1 year and made it 5m and 5m for each year. It makes us expenses lower on the current budget of that year.
Now there are arguments to be made "why not just take the full 10m and swallow that pill and be done with it" and I think those arguments have some validity to them. But we are a business that is trying to cut down a very expensive team and the management felt there was more value in spreading it out than taking the 10m (or whatever it was, i don't remember the exact net amount) hit all at once. Neither argument is more wrong or more right, just different ways of doing the accounting.
Another side of the 10 v 5+5 argument is that we were trying to loan him out and basically no team is going to pay his full 10m wages if we loaned him one for that one last year. Let's say somebody at most would be able to afford 3-4m, that's us paying 7-8m and being done in one year.
OR
We "extend" him and spread that 10 into 5+5 and now if we find a team in year 1 who can pay 3-4 and a team in year 2 who can pay 3-4 we only end up coming out of pocket 3-4m for our the two years of our portion instead of 8-9m. Nevermind if we find somebody who can pay the entire 6m in either year. This is the goal. How can we make our portion as low as possible, even if it means we extend the bleeding on his wages for another year.
Arthur got paid either way.
? Worst transfer ever in hindsight, lol.
