I don't think £35m for Drinkwater, £40m for Chamberlain or Barkley, makes sense under any circumstances. I can't recall too many instances of teams with title winning ambitions, signing this calibre of player, and it actually working to their advantage. If you sign squad players, what you tend to end up with is squad players playing in your first team, and the quality of the team and therefore results, dropping off. Whenever United have tried it, this has happened. You've done it in the past (notably when Jose whinged about it when he was there the first time around, and then walked out).
If a player isn't good enough to be in the first team, generally it means they are not good enough. If you play them 40 times a season, that's 40 times you are picking a player who isn't good enough. If you play them 10 times a season, that's still 10 times you are playing a player who isn't good enough. The team might get the result anyway...but the more you're picking players who are at a lower level, the more chances of you not getting the result you want/expect in games. The more of these players you have, the more likely you are to pick them.
Yeah you have to balance between having enough players, and having a good enough team, as you're not going to get 22 players who are all top quality and happy to sit around on the bench half the time. When you try to buy 3 or 4 of them in the last couple of days of the transfer window though, I just find this strange. You have a decent enough squad to not have to do that, from what I can see. You won't not win the league this season because you failed to sign Ross Barkley and play him instead of someone better than him.
I mean we're not talking about players who we don't really know much about. We all know exactly what these players can and can't do. It's the same with Evans and City...I don't get it. This is a player who wasn't good enough for United when our best defender was Chris Smalling and we were struggling for a top four place.
