No one is indispensable in football. It only seems that way. That's the message Manchester City should send Carlos Tevez. The club would be doing all of football a favor by calling his bluff.

If the City captain wants to go back to his homeland, so be it: Here's a free transfer to any team in Argentina with one caveat -- a non-compete clause in the deal that prohibits him from playing for any EPL side or team that qualifies for the Champions League through the 2014 World Cup.

Easy for me to write; I'm not trying to win the English championship for the first time since 1968. Tevez has 39 goals in 59 games for City, an impressive return. He is a truly gifted player, but this recent notion that superstar egos, like bubble-of-the-moment-inflated banks, are too big to regulate is dubious at best. Barcelona seems to do pretty well with its team-first ethos.

What makes the latest Tevez tempest so fascinating is that Manchester City, almost uniquely, has the financial resources to go out and buy any world-class replacement it requires in the January transfer window -- the likes of Diego Forlan, Luis Suarez, Javier Pastore, Edinson Cavani, Sergio Aguero or Karim Benzema. There's a good chance they could score a few goals for City, if given the chance.

But the real issue here isn't Tevez, but what he represents. In the wake of the fallout from his controversial transfer from Corinthians to West Ham in 2006, he is seen by many as the face of the dubious dealings of reprehensible representatives that are taking huge sums of money out of the game in deals that no one seems to be able to control. Perhaps, as has been widely reported, El Apache just wants to return home to be with his family. But if that were the case, he would readily accept the idea of a free transfer back to Buenos Aires that I propose here. I'm not holding my breath on that one.

Ultimately, it would be in City's interest to make a bold stand on player power. The team with the biggest pockets always attracts the biggest sharks. And City needs to demonstrate it can club those sharks on the nose to thwart their attacks

On the red side of Manchester, as City fans know only too well, a new crop of potential EPL champions is blooming this season. There's a reason Sir Alex Ferguson is the most successful manager in British soccer history: He never lets the lunatics run the asylum. It's time the Citizens of the so-called real Manchester followed the good knight's lead and say good day to their top man.