Which is why the Dortmund model with the occasional big signing should be the way to go, just look at Liverpool and Leicester in this league and how they have shot their way up the ladder with smart recruitment. Obviously Liverpool got lucky with the Coutinho and Suarez windfalls that got them some money but we can't deny that Salah, Mane, Robertson, Firmino and Wijnaldum are signings within what we might term the reasonable category and when they added the big money signings of Allison and Van Dijk they just went up a level. We tried to build a team where the cheapest players were the 30m players like Lindeloff and Mkhitaryan and filled up the squad with expensive flops such that when we do get the Pogba windfall it won't be enough to cover the cracks let alone improve.
In my view, for the business side to succeed we need a huge paradigm shift in our transfer policy, the first being we shouldn't have Woodward running it and the manager shouldn't have a big say because his stay is too dependent on results whilst his focus is most possibly divided at critical stages in the process of signing up players. Also the fear of having a DOF that might not fit the budgetary controls imposed doesn't hold water, if one is a professional they tow the company line. If he is told he has got 30m to spend he will spend that and not a penny more but the difference would be that with great knowledge of the market and connections within the industry he could get you more from that 30m than say Ole and Woodward who chose to spend the whole budget on a couple of defenders when they had just lost a key midfielder.
