Carlisle United have said they were told “at the beginning of talks” with Jamie Devitt that he had no intention of staying at Brunton Park.

This was, the Blues insist, “made very clear” to them early in a summer which has been dominated by the fate of their star midfielder.

This revelation is at the heart of United’s response after several days of criticism, which was triggered in particular by the idea that the offer of a one-year contract, rather than two, has cost them their best player.

Indeed, an interview on the club’s own website last week carried comments from Devitt to this end. The 28-year-old said a “one-year offer” was not the security he and his family needed, hence he was moving on (Blackpool, in League One, are believed to have a strong chance of signing him).

United have now accepted the invitation to give their side, and are adamant there is a slightly different story to be told.

They do not deny that Devitt was offered 12-month terms, but the Blues feel it significant that this also included an “option” which could easily have seen Devitt’s terms reviewed and extended by at least a further year, midway through the next campaign.

This may not placate supporters who feel a two-year offer should simply have been made up front. The Dubliner, after all, said the one-year proposal was “the only stumbling block”.

Two-year deals or more are not, it is clear, on Carlisle’s main agenda right now. This is a consequence of their current financial approach which David Holdsworth, the director of football, says is a response to the excessive spending habits of past seasons.

The presence of Edinburgh Woollen Mill, the club’s main financial backers since 2017, seems significant in this change of policy, which appears driven by a wish not to overcommit, or squander, as Holdsworth sees it, money supplied by supporters or sponsors.

This is on the same page as fans’ trust CUOSC, who, when describing some supporters’ criticism of the Devitt episode as “predictable”, also referred to the new “sobriety” at Brunton Park.

A picture is unavoidably painted, not for the first time, of the board, during Keith Curle’s managerial tenure, sanctioning contracts and in particular bonuses at a level which have since had to be reined in.

Some fans, though, find it hard to believe that prudence cannot still equate to two-year deals for your top players. They feel that United offering Devitt what they did was a false economy, destined to fail.

Yet negotiations were never, from minute one, as black and white as this, according to Holdsworth.

“We wanted Jamie to stay,” he said. “We made him a very good offer to become our highest-paid player, at the start of the window. And Jamie could have stayed another year – there was an option in that contract. If all was well and good for both parties, Jamie would have been here for two years, maybe longer.

“But Jamie’s agent made it very clear he would be going somewhere else. It was that simple – he’s going to move on. That was at the beginning of the talks. So when you get told that, you have to say, ‘Okay, where do we go?’ Do we try to match a League One club in terms of wages? Well, we can’t do that.

“I recognise the fans liked him. I do, and would have liked him to stay. But we have a structure here, and can’t match a League One club.”

It was said, earlier in the summer, that manager Steven Pressley wanted to build his team around Devitt. The reluctance to push the envelope in order to raise the chances of this happening is intriguing. As well as their financial policy, the agent angle and a possible response to being burned by other experienced players injured during longer deals (not that Devitt’s own injury record was particularly troubling), could it also be that United, in some ways, were more content to move on from Devitt than has been suggested publicly?

As ever, what happens next will determine how all this is remembered. If United compete well in 2019/20, it will temper at least some of the regret. If it proves a campaign of struggle, many will hark back to these weeks and question everything some more.

“Prior to him coming to Carlisle, Jamie had a spell at Morecambe where he played about 100 games, and before that he had a lot of clubs but hardly any games,” added Holdsworth, who expects to conclude a deal for an attacking midfielder tonight.

“He [Devitt] is a talented boy and was a good fit here, but he’s chosen to move on, and that was Jamie’s decision. We wish him well, there are no hard feelings and he’s always welcome to come back. Jamie plays in a specific role and he has to play in that position which is to his benefit. If not, he’ll be on the bench and become frustrated. Each player has a valued place, and Jamie would have had one here. But once Steven found out from his agent he was looking elsewhere, we couldn’t stand still.”

Holdsworth, speaking more generally about United’s finances, said the club had a previous reputation among disaffected sponsors of pouring money into a “black hole”.

“We’ve got to be diligent, we’ve got to be accountable,” he said.

This new tack, the theory goes, will present United as a more responsible operation to those currently lending support and whoever may wish to take it on in the future – whether that is EWM, whose loans amounted to £1.3m in the most recent club accounts, or another party.

Until then, it seems that two-year deals will remain scarce (although not in the case of teenage assets like Liam McCarron and Jarrad Branthwaite, who were put onto longer terms when turning pro). Nobody can pretend this will make life easier for the Blues in the market. Holdsworth does not argue otherwise.

It does not seem the most obvious route towards squad continuity either, though it will be interesting to observe how United act upon those players with contingency “options” in their one-year deals during 2019/20, and what message this sends in this respect.

“They will be performance and success-related,” Holdsworth said.