To me, there are only two situations where you should be buying a player you know will be a backup. Firstly, when they're cheap enough that it doesn't really matter, like when we got Delph. And secondly, when they're young enough that they might become good enough to start in the future, and will still have some resale value if they don't.
There are good reasons to not be in favour of the Evans move. He's not cheap, he's not young, and he's not likely to start most games. Having said that, we've been chasing him for two windows now, which suggests that it's not some impulsive decision made out of desperation. If he allows Pep to rotate the defence without causing too much disruption to our style of play (which Mangala struggles to do), then I'm willing to trust their judgement. I just hope we're not going to make the same mistake as last time we were on top and decided we didn't really need to strengthen with top class players and brought in a lot of second-rate ones that were impossible to shift for years afterwards.
Good, balanced post that. Hard to disagree with any of it.