To be honest, I hope this notion of not spending big on players is just doublespeak, misdirection, a red herring of sorts — something your local politician would say. Because being cheap, as some sort of overarching strategy that the club is going to adhere to, should not always be conflated with being sensible, and if Jim Ratcliffe are co. are genuinely of the opinion that Manchester United can contruct a top, top squad (i.e., good enough to genuinely go toe-to-toe with Manchester City in particular, year in and year out) by cutting corners and almost-exclusively targeting Moneyball™ signings, they are going to be in for a rude awakening.
Liverpool had the best (or the second best) coach of the last decade to galvanize their project — something we clearly don't have, which fundamentally alters the relative calculus and puts us in a less fortunate position. A few signings, like Robertson and Matip, were extreme value-for-money outliers, no doubt about that — but Firmino, Mané, Salah, Fabinho all cost upwards of €50 million when you adjust for inflation (all of them representing 10% of Liverpool's annual revenues, if not more, in terms of transfer outlay at the time, the equivalent for Manchester United right now would be €75 million or thereabouts), van Dijk was the most expensive defender of all time, Alisson was the most expensive goalkeeper of all time, and so on and so forth. And even though things surreptitiously worked out for them in terms of analytics and recruitment, they still mostly came up short against Manchester City in the league, which shows you how high the bar has been set by our cross-city rival.
This is not supposed to be an improved version of Nice, where you fiddle around for years on end and try to make ends meet with shoestring budgets, and still trail Brest, Lille and Monaco in the league after close to half a decade of ownership, with all due respect to that club, its supporters and its carousel of staff. The objectives of new part-ownership should befit a club that claims to be the biggest and greatest in the world: to build a collective that is at least one of the most competitive of the era, if not one of the greatest and most iconic of all time, commensurate with the stature of an institution like Manchester United.
That isn't to say the club should spend with reckless abandon and always cave in to seller clubs' demands, far from it. Lessons definitely need to be learnt from the oftentimes catastrophic debacles in the post Ferguson era, there are some Financial Fair Play and Profit and Sustainability stipulations that we will have to get around (they are not insurmountable if we are clever enough), and you should always pay attention to the bottom line while implementing a well-thought-out plan. If there's a chance to meaningfully improve the collective framework for peanuts, go for it. Even better if they have the versatility, mentality and age profile of Álvarez or Camavinga. But equally, if there's a chance to sign top, top talents who are likely to define the upcoming era and will command a premium in all likelihood, and we turn 'em down because we “don't spend big on players” as some sort of absolutist rule of thumb, more fool us — and to add insult to injury, a few of them will inevitably bolster the ranks of our rivals, and continue to torment us.
As regards João Neves, I'm not 100% sure he is what we need (and you could definitely argue that we might be able to procure 2-3 really good (perhaps even equally good) midfield talents for the same type of initial outlay), but if he truly is a class apart in terms of difference-making potential, it would behoove us to strongly consider him and maybe even bring him to the club as soon as possible. There's no point in waiting and operating with some premetidated, hypothetical timeline in mind in a fluid, everchanging environment like the transfer market, and a bird in hand (to go with the burgeoning core of Garnacho, Mainoo, Højlund) is worth two in the bush.
