When Alan Shearer was nearing the end of his playing days, the Guardian looked back at his career and described it as a ‘wreckage’.
The insinuation was that one of the greatest goalscorers of our times had given so much but was to end with so little, just one Premier League medal from his years at Blackburn.
It can be a hard dilemma to juggle, one that sets the love and sense of belonging that players feel at a club — in Shearer’s case Newcastle — against the cold hard currency of silverware.