The Jack Grealish distraction is one that no one at Everton needed after a good start to the season, so why allow it to become a distraction?
Grealish was clearly out of line if reports are true that he effectively went AWOL and spent a little too much time partying. We don't know if it is related in any way, but we also know that Grealish's close friend, Callum Robinson, who plays for Cardiff City, was suspended at the same time for failing to meet club standards.
But Everton can learn something from the South Wales club. Robinson hasn't played for Cardiff since, and he too was ousted from the squad, but there has been no emergence of a story on why. And keep in mind, the story could be anything, including something completely unrelated to Grealish.
Everton, meanwhile, decided to leak the story to the media, allowing a storm to whipped up around Grealish and the club once again. This could have been buried by an injury, or it could have been explained just as Cardiff explained it without leaking to the media.
Now, there are a lot of people around the club who could have done it, and it may not have been official policy to have filtered out the story, but a club has to be a tighter operation than that.
You protect your players from the media and you deal with in house with whatever punishment you see fit to serve out. And this is not defending Grealish, who is too old not to know better, but it's just not helpful to the Toffees, who are trying to move forward this season.
David Moyes has his men in sixth place, which represents real progress, and he now has to deal with questions about where Grealish is, reported concerns over signing the attacker and when he will return.
That's a distraction this Everton side doesn't need, and even when he does return, there are going to be relentless questions about whether he has learned his lesson, or perhaps more accurately, whether he is ever going to learn his lesson.
Everton are going to have to be smarter if they are going to become a club that competes with the top six or seven in the Premier League, and it starts with situations like this.
The bigger profile players who represent the clubs are going to get into sticky situations here and there, such is the nature of some of the better players. Everton have to see the bigger picture when dealing with such issues, and they must realise that the press are not their friend in these situations.
And don't get me wrong, as a journalist, it's great to have such content to go off, but from a football club's point of view, the only way is to punish the player, keep the information in-house, keep it on a need-to-know basis and move on swiftly.
That's something Everton need to learn from, and time will tell whether Grealish will learn his own lesson this time, after once again letting his personal life distract from his professional efforts.
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