Mancini frustrated by 'wasted' cash

Manchester City may be caricatured as a club where money is no object but manager Roberto Mancini has expressed frustration at his inability to remove a group of unwanted players who are bleeding hundreds of thousands of pounds from the club every week.

As their failure to find a buyer for Carlos Tevez has demonstrated, City's policy of paying high salaries and offering long contracts, begun under Mancini's predecessor Mark Hughes, has produced a pool of footballers who are almost unsellable. Once the deal to take Tevez back to Sao Paulo to play for Corinthians collapsed, there was only a handful of European clubs able to swallow his salary and even the likeliest of those, Internazionale, has been backing away.

Tevez, however, has a future if he stays at Manchester City, which is more than can be said for Emmanuel Adebayor, Craig Bellamy, Wayne Bridge, Roque Santa Cruz and Shaun Wright-Phillips, none of whom will feature in Mancini's Premier League squad. Even at a conservative estimate, they are costing City around £350,000 a week.

"I don't like the club spending so much on these players," said Mancini.

Adebayor is still likely to leave for Tottenham, although the deal is not as imminent as has been suggested. The Celtic manager, Neil Lennon, said yesterday he would be interested in Santa Cruz, although Bellamy's wages made his return to Celtic Park – where he played after falling out with Newcastle – unfeasible.

Tevez may still play for Manchester City but he is unlikely to start at Bolton tomorrow because of his exertions in the Copa America.

"There are reasons why Carlos wants to leave," said Mancini. "I respect his reasons, but if we don't close a move for him he will stay with us. At the moment there is no other club prepared to pay his value."