Emmanuel Adebayor released from his Tottenham contract

For everyone out there who was wondering when, how, if the Emmanuel Adebayor soap opera would ever end- you've finally got your answer.

We can confirm that we've reached a mutual agreement with @E_Adebayor which will see him released from his contract with the Club.

— Tottenham Hotspur (@SpursOfficial) September 13, 2015

After the developments of the last few months, it's pretty safe to say that this looked like an almost inevitable conclusion to Ade's time at White Hart Lane. Whilst the fruitless back-and-forth with West Ham and Aston Villa over the summer indicated clearly that no other club was going to be willing or able to take Ade's wages off our books before his time with us came to a natural end, Spurs boss Mauricio Pochettino's refusal to allocate Adebayor a squad number or register him for the 25-man Premier League squad this season proved that the Togolese striker had finally become a total persona non grata at the club. With Pochettino confirming this week that Adebayor's time in the first team was done, it seemed that for everyone to be able to progress onwards positively, Daniel Levy was going to have to suck it up and give Manny one final payoff.

There's going to be a lot of commentary about this in the media and across the Tottenham-supporting corner of the Internet over the next day or so, and little of it is likely going to paint the most mercurial of Tottenham's forwards of recent years in a particularly positive light. For many, his final year at Spurs will be taken as decisive proof of the longstanding trope that Ade is and always has been too uncommitted to any one team's cause to contribute positively to them over the whole life of his time there.

Though I don't hold out much hope, I'd prefer to see people view this from a slightly different angle. While his streaky form and long periods of underexertion could be infuriating at times, as could the occasional reports of the negative impact he had in the locker room, I'd like to think that Spurs fans can still make their peace with Adebayor now the time has finally come for a parting of ways. Instead of seizing a final opportunity to stick the boot in, it would be nice to see a few Spurs fans wish the best to a man who, while obviously battling some very serious problems in his personal life, displayed sparkling talent over two half-seasons in 2011 and 2014 and, if only in patches, provided us with an solution to that most eternal of problems: #weneedastriker.