Mark Hughes, the Manchester City manager, says John Terry needs "a change of scenery" and "a different challenge" after an entire career spent at a single club. Fair enough, you might think. It must be difficult to motivate yourself to battle for major trophies at Chelsea every single season. How Terry must yearn to experience getting knocked out of the FA Cup by some League One chancers, to end his seasons scuffling desperately for a Europa League place, and for a chance to watch at first hand the inner workings of a club which has over the years become football shorthand for comic failure.
It is uncanny that City's other major English signing this summer, Gareth Barry, was suffering from just such a malaise at Aston Villa before Hughes came to the rescue. "I need a new challenge," he said after completing his transfer last month. "I have a massive fear of going stale and falling into a comfort zone."
Is Hughes simply scouring the nation's bread bins, hoping that he'll come upon the odd stale England international among the lightly moulding crumpets? Or is he taking us all for fools?
There are two ways of looking at this. One is to accept that no player should be expected to perform at the same level at the same club for longer than – well, however long his attention span is, a year or two or five – without getting a little bit itchy in the feet department. Some might never find it an issue, but others will legitimately decide that a change of scenery is necessary if they are to remain motivated.
The other is to decide it's a bit fishy that the new scenery all these stale players seem to consider ideal for their continued motivation is owned by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, whose family fortune tops a trillion dollars and who is willing to stump up a rumoured £250,000 a week to help Terry work through his issues. If the England captain really wants a challenge, if that's genuinely what he's after, he'd probably find a pretty good one at Burnley, say, or Newcastle, or Luton.
Cynics might read "stale" simply as a euphemism for "greedy", consider "a new challenge" footballer-speak for "a bigger wage packet". They will wonder what, other than money, would convince a top-level player to sign for City at this early stage in their lavishly funded rise to supposed supremacy. To them, Carlos Tevez's insistence yesterday that "money has never been important" and his transfer was motivated by an innocent desire to find "a coach who wants me" would have sounded similarly, ludicrously, unconvincing.
If Terry moves, should we give him the benefit of the doubt, or should we damn him forever as a slave to a gaudy, golden god? Or, a third way, should we just let him conduct his career however he likes and not search dementedly for a truth we know will never be revealed?
