What it means:

is that if you buy a player for £12m on a 4 year contract you would reduce that cost evenly over the life of the contract. So after 2 year you would show an asset on the balance sheet of £6m (with £3m going to your costs for each of those two years). If, however, you had reason to believe that nobody would ever pay you anything for him then to be prudent you would have to write off that £6m asset and put it straight to costs (rather than spread it over the remainder of the contract)

Posted By: mr carra, Oct 24, 11:47:32