The squad is far more complex then that mate. Mirallas also has a contract i think until 2020.
Firstly most people look at the squad from a footballing perspective, how great it would be to sell players and replace them with others from a business point of view its far different.
There are many dynamics at play in terms of squad management and a deal being in the best interests of the club. Let me explain a few key points.
Weighing up what you get for a player i.e. selling Bolaise for 5 million, doesn't mean the club is making 5 million. Players transfer fees are usually made in installments of 3 or 5 years. I suspect ours are mostly 5 years. So if you sign Bolasie for 27 million and he has two and half years left on his contract, he has a book price of 13.5 million i.e. what we still owe Palace for him. Getting 5 million for him sees us pretty much crystallizes a loss of 8.5 million. Now we may be prepared to do that on a couple of occasions in fact we did this and made a huge loss on Klassen, but we cant afford to do it on all our players, you are looking at the likes of Walcott, Tosun, Schnderlin, Bolaise and most of the lads out on loan. So those players are really difficult to get rid of with out a loss and long periods on their contracts because their market value has dropped since we signed them, if we do sell them lower we are taking on 10s of millions cummlitive losses, obviously wages in mitigation of the context of any deal have to be factored into. But the player isnt likely to volutarily take a lower wage, nor a club take on their existing wage unless the transfer fee was lower. We are already operating a 30 mill loss this season in my opinion.
Then you look at players, who are low hanging fruit, Baines and Jagielka out of contract, McCarthy maybe even Coleman. A football fan looks at that and rubs there hands and says great we will get them off the wage bill and have more money. Wrong, because these lads have been at the club so long we dont owe anything on the transfer fees and the only outgoing is on their wage. So essentially if you let Baines and Jageilka go or McCarthy you are creating a space in the squad that needs to be filled by a transfer fee and giving them leaving players wage. Its always a good thing to have have long standing players around with zero liability in a transfer fee. Colemans case is interesting in that his book price is very low and would command a big fee.
Then we have the players who would bring in a profit i.e. more then what we paid. You are looking at the players you wouldn't look to loose here, Richalison, Pickford, Digne, Gueye and Lookman. Not ideal selling any of those, but break glass should the capital be needed.
Academy players are interesting, they dont have a book price and are pure profit. People were questioning the decision of giving Pennington a new deal in the summer. Its a no brainier, he has a profile in the championship, clubs willing to pay 1 mill every season to loan him and eventually he will be sold. All pure profit, similarly anyone on loan from the academy or sold is pure profit. This is something Chelsea do very well.
So essentially the squad is dynamic to the context of the deal we have with player, that sets the criteria for the context of any deal out. Its is far more complicated then looking at the squad and picking the players that need to be sold and saying they will be sold for so much then so much that can then be invested into the team, its not how it works at all. It why net spend isn't worth anything. To illustrate what i mean take Mori's deal in the summer, we sold him for less then we paid, but because we had almost paid his whole transfer fee when we sold him, we made about a 7mill profit on him.
You can see in all the above why the role of DOF has become so vogue as its complex and skilled to navigate in budgets.
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