Also from FT
The crux was that I still don't think people quite understand the relationship between Amortisation and FFP and that it really, really isn't simple to "just" sell footballers - ESPECIALLY for a loss.
The problem isn't that "Rudkin can't sell players", the problem is that we as a club have signed too many players for too much money that haven't lived up to expectations. Its the amount we buy them for with the risks that we do that then make them so difficult to sell because you need to clear the entire book value of a footballer in that one year that you sell which can cause crippling losses as far as FFP is concerned.
We overpaid for, for example, Soumare by so much that literally nobody wants to buy him for enough money that we wouldn't be screwed by our own amortisation if we sell him "too early." And that's ignoring the fact that because we're paying him big old Premier League wages he quite possibly doesn't want a permanent move even if clubs are interested (see Dennis Praet and formerly Yannik Vestergaard.)
Now don't get me wrong, as I said earlier, that still means the buck stops with Rudkin but the problem isn't that he can't sell - Don fvcking Draper couldn't sell Bouba Soumare or Dennis Praet for a profit - the problem is that we identified these talents in the first place and signed them for inflated fees well above their market value (also see Islam Slimani, Rachid Ghezzal, Filip Benkovic, Timothy Castagne, Bartosz Kaputska, Adrien Silva and a long list of other flops.)
I highly doubt Rudkin personally identified any of these targets, it isn't really his wheelhouse, but he has overseen the recruitment of a procession of extremely middle-of-the-road heads of recruitment since Walsh left and he has been involved in the negotiations of the fees of a lot of these players and he does seem to have a track record of going extremely high with fairly poor negotiations. The best two deals this club have done in the last few decades was the sales of Maguire and Fofana and its my understanding Whelan got involved to directly oversee both of those?
So I'm not defending the guy entirely and I'm largely in the camp that if we want to be a world class football club then we need to start acting like one, I've said before that I do actually like our owners' valuation of loyalty and commitment but ultimately you wouldn't find Tony Bloom letting his inadequate mate stick around as the DoF for so long just because he's loyal. But I do think people are expecting water from wine when they think that anyone, and I do mean anyone, is going to easily just sell Souttar, Soumare, Kristiansen, et all.
We're fvcking stuck with them for the long haul and people need to get used to it.