Spurs may need to pay Adebayor to offload him this summer

To absolutely no one's surprise, Tottenham Hotspur appear to have an Emmanuel Adebayor problem. The Togolese striker is earning around £100,000 a week (or more!) at Spurs, but is out of favor with manager Mauricio Pochettino and the club is near desperate to offload him. With a year still to go on his Spurs contract it now appears that the only surefire way to get him off the books would be to release him on a free and pay the difference in his wages at a new club.

Tottenham have been trying to sell Ade for a while now and very nearly offloaded him on loan to West Ham this January before Daniel Levy apparently scuppered the deal over concerns about having to subsidize his wages at a club that was (at the time) a direct competitor to Spurs. The Telegraph suggests that West Ham are still interested in him, as is Tim Sherwood at Villa, but it's a hard sell to convince any club to take on a 31-year old striker with a history of attitude problems and a year to go on his contract.

According to the Telegraph, Ade's contract stipulates that until the length of his Tottenham contract expires, Spurs are liable to pay the difference between his new club's wages and what he's earning now. So, even Spurs release him and he lands at a club that will pay him £60k a week, Spurs would need to pay £40k/week for one year until his Spurs contract would've expired. This is similar to the situation that Spurs found themselves in when they originally signed Adebayor from Manchester City. City were desperate enough to get let him go that they subsidized his wages for the first two years of his Spurs contract. We all laughed at that at the time. Now the tables are turned, and it's not as funny anymore.

Ade holds all the cards here. There are, I'm sure, plenty of clubs in Turkey or the Middle East who would gladly take him and pay his wages, but indications are that Ade wants to stay in the Premier League and might not agree to a transfer. Spurs can either let him rot in on the bench for £100k a week, or release him this summer and pay a percentage of his wages after he moves. Daniel Levy probably hates both solutions, but only one of them costs Tottenham less money.