Chicken and egg though. If we got promoted we probably wouldn't have to sell as many. Eg, if we'd gone up in the Weir/Clough season, we'd have probably kept Harry, gone up last season and kept Murphy.
We're not the only club to sell players but we seem to be one of the worst at dealing with it.
In my opinion, our wage bill is ridiculous. We have too many senior players and we pay most of them far too much, a lot more than we can afford. So we keep selling players and ploughing the cash into sustaining this wage bill, when we should be signing good replacements.
We have wasted a huge amount of money on high wages for players who haven't justified it and have no resale value. In many cases we struggle to give them away because no one else at our level can afford their wages
We have pursued this strategy, for most of the time, since we got relegated from the PL (after Robson's binge) and it hasn't worked.
Until we start living within our means, keeping the wage bill under control and investing in players for the future (ie buying them) the owners will continue to lose money and get nowhere.
The fundamentals of football never change; you scout hard, find good players, buy them. Sell the odd one on when they've done a job for you and are highly valued and reinvest in new good players.
Anyone who thinks they can shortcut that process is an idiot who will lose a lot of money.