As anyone who's played any kind of football management game will know, the weekly wage is only one part of what goes into a contract negotiation. There's agent fee, signing on bonus, appearance fee and any other number of bonuses that you can think of.
There's also the curious thing known as a loyalty bonus. Essentially this means that if a player stays at a club for a certain amount of time, they are owed a lump sum because they haven't looked for a move elsewhere. That's the idea at least. However, as Liverpool are currently finding out, it doesn't always serve that purpose.
Sometimes, it serves to keep your hapless striker laughing his ass off knowing you have to pay him a shedload of cash if you can't find someone to take him off your hands. As you may have guessed that's what is essentially happening with Mario Balotelli at the moment.
Liverpool are willing to pay as much as 60% of his wages if it means he'll go on loan to one of Lazio or Sampdoria. However, the problem is that Balotelli appears to have no intention of leaving knowing that he'll pick up a hefty loyalty bonus if he's still at Anfield at the end of the transfer window.
A loyalty bonus is nothing new. However, you have to think that Liverpool would have had their reservations when they were signing the Italian last summer, Brendan Rodgers has admitted as much. The question you then have to ask is, how could they not have foreseen this situation developing?
Apparently they didn't and now they have a £70,000 a week striker training away from the first team and seemingly happy to do that as long as the money is rolling in.
