There's a very common tendency to over stretch other people's arguments in order to try and prove a point.
I don't see why thinking the club should've spent more on transfers than AFC Bournemouth in net terms over the past 5 years means that you automatically want the club to sign Balotelli, Lambert and a huge amount of crap. That doesn't even mean that one necessarily thinks FSG should be investing their own money; but rather that one believes transfers and wages - that is, football spending - is the most important one at the club and that it should take priority over other spending. The club generates enough revenue to sustain more net spending than that, surely. Or at the very least, if only the club were paying our players similar wages to our competitors, maybe it could have been excused for a negative net spend on transfer fees. But that's not the case either. Our highest earners probably don't get close to any of the clubs around us, with the exception of Spurs, who by no accident are the only club without a trophy for longer than us in that top 6.
Also, the idea that buying a replacement for Philippe Coutinho now would be "panic" buying is utterly ridiculous, for the club knew he was leaving a long time ago. There was plenty of time to prepare. Not replacing him, just like not getting VVD in the summer, was a failure - no need to sugarcoat it - it was a failure in strategy or execution (negotiations). Hopefully we'll be able to remedy it in the summer as we did with VVD in the winter window, but that does not erase the initial error.
And if the timing was not right in August for selling because we couldn't replace him, then nothing changed now, which means he shouldn't have been sold now either.
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