Losses are mounting up every month by simply having to pay them alot of money every month. The wage costs over the course of a contract is just as high if not more than the transfer fee.
Ahhh, that is the
key to understanding how the board operates!
They are accountants and use every accountant trick that they can. Regarding transfers this means that they assign expenses along all the years that extend from the player's first contract with the club. This lets them not equate real payments to accounting expenses, which gives room to the business operations and simply helps to equate publicity contracts that run year by year to weird (in the financial sense) expenses such as transfers.
Buuut it also means that if you sell a player for less than what is assigned to cost (salary + transfer amortization) for the remaining years (again, as seen from their initial contract timeline), then you have to note a
loss into the clubs books. This accounting loss, as your instinct very well tells you, is
not a real loss, but an accounting one, and has taxation and credit servicing consequences to the club, meaning that it well could translate into real losses if the margin is too thin.
Also the board members have to tie a significant amount of their assets to the club in order to be the board, and an accountant shortfall can trigger a legal battle for those assets.
In summary, transfers are valued in a made-up way that has very real consequences, and those consequences can be avoided entirely by pretending that the player is being amortized in the pitch, even if he is a Douglas-lite that never plays.