For a club like Manchester City, with an astronomical wage bill, the prospect of trying to offload the vast swathes of players you have acquired in recent years is a daunting one indeed. Few clubs want to pay similar prices that were initially paid for these players and even fewer want to pay the wages that said players have become accustomed to.
Subsequently the option of loaning out unwanted players at a club like Manchester City is an attractive one. They might not be able to sell their players, but at least they can reduce the wage bill.
There is nothing wrong with this in itself. Any club who has unwanted players on their pay roll has a responsibility to that player’s career to ensure that they facilitate as much playing time as possible for that player.
However when any club allows a player to leave on loan, is it right that the player on loan should be allowed to compete against all of their parent club’s rivals without ever being allowed to face their parent club itself?
Emmanuel Adebayor is the most poignant example but he is not the only one. For a club such as City, for whom money is not an issue, it almost seems to work out to their advantage that they should be able to loan out a top class striker to a rival and therefore allow him to play for Spurs against Chelsea, Man Utd, Arsenal and Liverpool without having the danger of ever being able to play in matches against City.
If Tottenham are paying the majority of his wages then this situation, which benefits City as much as it does Tottenham, has more than a slight negative tint when it comes to the issue of fair competition. Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger is one of the managers to speak out against such scenarios: