The elephant in the room with this argument is that this strategy contributed to our relegation.
As John Maynard Keynes once said 'in the long term, we're all dead."
I am attracted to the idea of having Ramsdale as a life long Blade, nailing the spot like our very own Buffon.
Bit I also think "who am I kidding?"
Football is so incredibly short term, especially nowadays.
Even with our recent success, we're regularly bringing in 8-10 players each summer. Gone are the days of the Liverpool manager being asked for the team and him responding "same as last season".
I'd like to not have the seasonal churn but to be in that position you have to be relatively successful like Burnley have been.
Going down, we'll have a cash hole to fill, we'll have some players who feel they can retain their PL wages by moving and shouldn't have to endure their contracts dropping their salary and we'll have others we want to move on because they aren't what we want any more.
Ironically the time to add modestly was probably last summer but we really cocked that up.
I'll accept the notion of Captain Hindsight on this one but as few as 3 directly into the team and nothing else might have served us better with lower fees and higher individual wages perhaps.
Rammers for up to 18.5m might have high potential but for immediate needs, Danny Ward from Leicester would probably have been tempted for a much lower fee given his age and he's clearly far from past it. A first team gig at a team finishing 9th only a few places below his current club, would have been hard to turn down. Plus he'd get a great reception having already pissed on Wednesday's bonfire whilst on loan at Huddersfield.
Tackling the elephant in the room and getting a proper Lundstram replacement and getting also a full time O'Connell replacement would have been more judicious than the bits and bobs we did and of course the not so bitty 23m on Brewster. If we'd stopped at 3 of that nature, no issue here. It might have meant keeping Freeman and Osborn as back ups. I could have lived with that. Even without Brewster we had 5 strikers on the books. Chris tried to do too much and ended up achieving very little.