Certain highly paid Premier League players who don't fit a manager's plans have begun to have difficulty leaving.

Bastian Schweinsteiger and Joe Hart fell out of favor with Jose Mourinho and Pep Guardiola respectively but each make more than £200,000 per week.

“There are a handful of teams in the Premier League who are under a lot of pressure to buy players,” said José María Cruz, the chief executive of the Spanish team Sevilla. “They pay a lot of money, and so they need an immediate return on that investment: They need the players to perform straightaway.

“If they do not, they are already looking for a replacement after three or six months. But trying to offload the players who are no longer wanted is very complicated because the salaries are so high. They are not realistic for most clubs in Europe.”

“They are paying crazy wages for mediocre players,” Christian Heidel, the longtime sporting director at German club Mainz, who is now with Schalke, said before he changed teams last year.

“They will struggle to get rid of those players in the future. They buy more players every year, and the squads will become too big. They will end up spending more on redundancies than they do on transfers.”