Benoit Assou-Ekotto paid £40,000 a week...to sit in Tottenham's reserves

Benoit Assou-Ekotto is being paid £40,000 a week by Tottenham despite not playing for the first team for more than 18 months.

The defender does not even train with the first-team squad these days as he prepares for a move in the January transfer window.

Tottenham manager Mauricio Pochettino excluded Assou-Ekotto from his first-team squad when he arrived at the club and doesn’t want him anywhere near his group.

Instead the left-back, who spent last season on loan at Queens Park Rangers in the Championship, has a separate training schedule and has been allocated a fitness coach.

Assou-Ekotto has had a chequered career in English football and has fallen out with a number of Spurs managers since his arrival from Lens in 2006 for a reported £3.5million.

He has a particularly difficult relationship with Tottenham chairman Daniel Levy and the pair have rarely agreed on various matter since his move to White Hart Lane.

The Cameroon international, 30, who caused further frustration at the end of the summer transfer window when he turned down a number of loan moves to Championship clubs, has also made it clear on a number of occasions that he plays football simply for money and regards it as simply a job.

In an interview in The Guardian in 2010 he said: ‘It’s only a job. Yes, it’s a good, good job and I don’t say that I hate football but it’s not my passion.

‘I don’t understand why everybody lies. The president of my former club Lens, Gervais Martel, said I left because I got more money in England, that I didn’t care about the shirt.

I said: “Is there one player in the world who signs for a club and says, Oh, I love your shirt?” Your shirt is red. I love it. He doesn’t care. The first thing that you speak about is the money. ‘Martel said I go to England for the money but why do players come to his club? Because they look nice? All people, everyone, when they go to a job, it’s for the money.

‘So I don’t understand why, when I said I play for the money, people were shocked. Oh, he’s a mercenary. Every player is like that.’

He fell out with Tottenham earlier this year after it emerged that he had invited anti-Semitic comedian Dieudonne M’bala M’bala to a game at Tottenham, insisting he would ‘love it’.

In a tweet that was subsequently deleted, Assou-Ekotto, then on loan at QPR, messaged the man who invented the controversial quenelle gesture used by Nicolas Anelka to celebrate a goal for West Brom.

Spurs bosses have made it perfectly clear that the defender is free to leave and can join the first club who are prepared to meet his wage demands.