Here's the thing. If you think we should've signed Sanchez/Hazard/Fabregas (delete as appropriate) and believe that we didn't through some sort of incompetence on our part then you should probably stop commenting on such matters because you clearly don't understand them.
The year we won the title for the first time Khaldoon made it clear in his end of season review, that moving forward things would be different with respect to our approach to the transfer market. The accelerated spending was over and moreover, with FFP just over the horizon, the time had come to start cutting back since the core of a winning team was quite clearly there. What we needed to do was bring the wage bill more in line with our turn over, we needed to reshape and rebalance the squad as there were far too many players being paid way more than they were worth, which had a dual effect. Firstly it meant that for the wages we were paying we weren't getting value for money, and more importantly, shifting those heavy earners off the books was problematic because nobody wanted to take on the stupid contracts we'd given them.
What the club have done since that summer is very clear and very simple. They've taken the core of that first title winning side and extracted maximum value out of it (two titles in three years, potentially three in four), whilst simultaneously working on reducing the wage bill, getting us through the first FFP monitoring period, whilst keeping us competitive on the pitch. It isn't as eye catching as when we were signing Kun, Toure, etc. But it's a process we needed to go through because as we've seen, even with this three year drive towards sustainability we still failed FFP and were hit with sanctions. It doesn't bare thinking about how bad those sanctions would've been had we stuck to two fingers up at UEFA in the first place and carried on spending.
So people need to understand that Fernandinho and Sanchez, or Mangala and Sanchez, simply didn't cost the same amount of money. That's the kind of naive and simplistic logic which infuriates. Clubs don't make decisions on players based solely on their transfer fee, it's based on their wages plus transfer fee. Sanchez is purported to earn around 200k a week at Arsenal, which would be double what Mangala earns. Similarly Fabregas at Chelsea. So again you can say "they cost the same as Mangala" but that's just naive bollocks.
Next problem with this whole "we should've signed XYZ". When you're going after top players you have to first make sure you've got room in the squad for them. You can't just buy players on top of players. It's something which again goes back to the "we should've signed Hazard/Van Persie" narrative. The owners, Sheikh Mansour, Khaldoon, made it abundantly clear to Mancini and co that there was NO way that a player like that was coming in unless room was made for them in the first team by selling another top earner. This wasn't some naive decision or some penny pinching exercise for the sake of it without any view on the football side of things. It was equally a footballing decision based on the fact that there were 4 supposedly world class forwards already at the club. Buying another one would've been a joke without moving one on first. This applies equally to the players we supposedly missed out on this summer. Had we gone after Fabregas without selling Toure he wouldn't have come anyway because - well at Chelsea he had a manager saying "you start every week, you're the main playmaker". Same with Sanzhez. He is undisputed number 1 at Arsenal. At City he'd have been in the same situation as Barca, part of a squad, playing some weeks to playing others.
So lets look specifically at the narrative that the players we've bought in the last three years have been shit. Or since the blame is squarely apportioned to Txiki, lets look at the players which Txiki has bought. It's both deluded, and revisionist rag nonsense to suggest that we bought badly in the summer of 2013. Demichelis, Negredo, Navas, and Fernandinho all played INTEGRAL parts in our title and league cup win. You can't have bad transfer policy by anyone's definition if you end the season with a lower wage bill than you ended the previous season, yet finish higher in the league and win more trophies. Not by anyone'e standards is that bad business. Maybe it wasn't long term business, but as I keep saying, we were working towards a very specific financial plan and for a specific time period.
I realise it's a forum but it's quite depressing how out of touch some posters are with the reality of what is going on at our football club and why things are the way they are when it comes to buying/selling players. Never mind Txiki or Ferran, we should be giving Mansour and Khaldoon a little more respect than acting out like little kids whenever we don't win a football match.
