You can't have one the most expensive players in the world not playing nor even being available for selection, and the issue not becoming an ongoing headline. This needs some Comms'... people will just investigate, someone, somewhere will eventually 'talk'... etc, etc. It's far from ideal, and I do wonder about Sancho himself. Maybe the club is too big for him. Similar to the Zaha signing in that respect.
From a purely financial POV, players are assets ie their value can be written in a spreadsheet and used (ex to justify more debt, FFP etc). Its within the club's interest that the player's value goes up or at least it doesn't depreciate. As you said its almost impossible to hide the disappearance of an 80m signing especially in the UK were there seems to be this idea that clubs like ours owe the national team some sort of debt or something which is repaid by playing English players.
Now let's say ETH came out and said that Sancho's attitude is wrong. Then potential buyers would take that in account. The same would happen if he says that he has mental issues or he struggles to remain fit. So how would clubs avoid that? Let's have a look to what ETH said.
"We want to bring him back as quickly as possible, but I can’t give a prognosis of when that will be. Sometimes there are circumstances with
fitness and
mood. We got a drop of quality level and sometimes you
don’t know why or what is causing it. That is what we are doing now to try to get him back there. It is a
combination of
physically and
mentally."
That's very smart and its called distribution of fault. Let me give you an example of that. Imagine we're in a forum (not redcafe) and there's a trigger friendly mod (ex devilish) who banned you for a week when in reality he should have just infracted you. You contest that ban and after 3 days an admin reverse the ban. Now if that admin tells you the truth then you'll have a strong argument to get that person demoted or even banned. However if that admin tells you something within this line ie we have a policy were 2-3 posters highlight your post, then a mod takes that post to a committee which then decides what action should be taken. Then you're less likely to push for a ban simply because there's too many moving parts that needs to be punished. That's a common practice politicians like to use. Instead of placing the blame on 1-2 things (ex Politician A messed up or Brexit) they will try to distribute it on various factors (lack of productivity, the Ukrainian war, Covid, inflation, recession, neighbouring country being mean, trade wars, oil prices had shot up etc) which in turn diminishes the punishment of such fault on them. Defence lawyers tend to do the same. They'll try to distribute the fault on many things (mental sanity, upbringing, provocation etc) to try and shift the blame on as many things as possible.
A potential buyer might stir away at a player whose manager had labelled him as injury prone or has an attitude problem or has mental issues. However they might give a player with an unfortunate combination of that a second shot. That's because its not uncommon for a player to pass from a bad patch (ex being used as a scapegoat during a major tournament) which in turn might have affected his fitness.
never has someone had a more appropriate tagline than you.