So getting rid of Fellaini and Herrera wasn't enough to relief this "bloated wage budget". We need to get rid of another one too, God knows why.I'm pretty sure everyone at the club would love to go out and purchase a couple of top quality midfielders. Unfortunately, the reality is that we have a bloated wage budget on mediocre to poor squad players who are contributing nothing to team. Players realistically obtainable to us are either - good options but likely will never be the quality to take us up a level or prospects that we'd have to develop to top level. We can't afford to continually do bad business when we have so many duds aboard. An exit of Matic does afford us a measure of leniency to take a punt on a midfielder who otherwise wouldn't be a top 5 candidate in a regular summer window.
I bet after getting rid of Matic and not replacing him, the next in line will be: "We'll first need to offload Fred and Periera to be able to buy more players".