The transfer of Kevin Mirallas could offer Everton a blueprint for offloading some of the squad's unwanted players before next week's deadline.
Mirallas left the Blues in late August last year, just a few days before the windows shut around Europe, to join Belgium side Royal Antwerp.
The attacker had just under 12 months of his Goodison contract remaining and Everton had been hoping to recoup a transfer fee from this sale, even though he was into the final year of his deal.
However, the Blues' demands - between €6-8m according to the player - were proving prohibitive to his sale and eventually the club agreed to let him leave on a free transfer.
He would sign a one-year-deal with Antwerp and is currently said to be without a club.
Mirallas was reported to earn £70,000-a-week at Everton and having taken a pay-cut to join Fiorentina on loan in 2018, is reported to have done the same to ensure his move to Antwerp could happen.
Fast-forward over a year and the Blues left facing a similar conundrum with Sandro Ramirez, Yannick Bolasie and Mo Besic.
Besic, having spent last season playing in the Premier League with Sheffield United, is confident he can find a new club before Monday's cut-off point but the noises around Sandro and Bolasie are less certain.
Sandro is back training at Finch Farm but had not returned in time to play in any of the pre-season games and remains in limbo.
Bolasie played in both warm-up games with Blackpool and Preston North End but has not been included in any of the five games of the season.
In an interview last week, the winger - who has watched Everton's games from the stands at Goodison - said he wants to stay and fight for his place but the Blues say he is continuing to look for a new club, with Olympiakos linked.
Yet the fear, as it stands, is that Sandro and Bolasie's wage demands make them difficult to move on.
Everton will want to avoid loaning the players out if they can and, instead, find a permanent new home but their respective wages, of £86,000 and £70,000-a-week, have been prohibitive to achieving this for the past two seasons.
And so the Blues, in wanting to remove the players from the wage bill completely may have to look back to how a compromise was reached in order for Mirallas's transfer to Antwerp to go through.
Pre-Covid, Everton are believed to have set the asking price for Bolasie at around £2.5m and had hoped to recoup some of the £5.2m they spent on Sandro in the summer of 2017.
But with less than a week of the window left, and with the enquires the club have received over both players yet to materialise into firm offers, Everton may have to accept moving the pair out for free, just like Mirallas was.
The players are still contracted to the club for another nine months so unless any buying club is prepared to take their wages on, in full, then the Blues may have to try and come to an agreement over their remaining wages, or hope they accept reductions in salary to help smooth a move to a new club.
Everton eventually found a way to offload Mirallas and will hope to do the same with the players on this window's unwanted list.
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