We all understand the accounting tricks. But there's other players we could sell if we wanted to. We could have sold Bremer for 70M for instance. Not saying we should though. If we sold Bremer would we just have to accept it because they did it?
At the end of the day, we sold Soule to help fund Douglas Luiz. That's what it really boils down to. In the long run, Luiz will cost us 30M net after the other players went to Aston Villa, so we basically traded three young players away for him.
Would the result be different if we regarded Soule as a better talent than he might be? Probably not, because regardless of who is in charge here, we always up selling or loaning young players. It's just what we do. I wouldn't be surprised if we ended up selling Yildiz next summer too. Interchange his name with Guler and it would be the same result as well. So the morale of the story is, it doesn't matter to many of us what the financing ramifications are. People are sick of this nonsense year after year.
We spent a lot on Douglas Luiz and he better put in consistent, world class performances, otherwise he will cost us huge in the long run.