Laughable you seem to think that if Lowe puts his hand up and says meekly "Please sir, Mr. Barclays, my manager thinks this player may enable us to have a more successful season, bringing in more gate revenue and in the really best case help us to compete for promotion, we'd like to keep him", that Mr. Barclays is going to say "FOOK OFF, the administrators will be round on Monday morning".
The black-white way you are portraying this is hillarious and suggests a limited scope for rational thought..
The truth is, Lowe has probably paid sod-all attention to his managers wishes, and sought a compromise, and most likely just looked at the list of wage earners.