Bye bye Tiote!

It's not conjecture. It's accounting practice for writing down the value of an asset.

Look, I don't really see what you are arguing about. It's a completely rational approach for expensing any purchase of a player. If you buy a player for £10m on a 5 year contract, then it makes perfect sense to expense that out at £2m a year. That isn't conjecture, it's an accounting technique for an intangible asset that will not have any residual value at the end of the 5 year period (a free transfer). If some value happens to be realized during that period, then that will be accounted for.

 

Yes I know. It is one of two accepted accounting practices. See the comments above.

The fact that it's an accounting practice does not make it factual. Many accounting practices are based on a variety of hypotheses. This is one of them.

The hypothesis is simple to apply and therefore widely used in many types of business. The result produced is often extremely inaccurate.

As stated above, I have no objection to the club using this convention. It is just wrong, though, to treat the result prodcued as showing the club's "real" financial position. It doesn't (unless in the period in question there was a net decrease in player value which happens to equate to the aggregated write down: possible but unlikely).

 

This particular asset has a known residual value of zero at the end of its 'life.' If you want to assess the overall value of the company, then fine, it's problematic, but the accounts are for any given financial year, so they are attempting to spread expenses.
And if you mean hypothesis in the sense of one particular accounting theory, then fine, but if you are saying it's just another form of conjecture, then no, I completely disagree.

 

I think we've ended up talking about different things.