I get where you're coming from, I just think that when Woodward left this should be the time to show we've moved on from those days of sky high contracts to players who don't really deserve them, if we give rashford a 4 or 5 yesr contract at 20m a year, that's us saying that that's our wage structure that we're happy with. If we look to sign kane, and rashford has just been given 375k a week, kane's well within his rights to ask for 500k a week when before 375 would have been about his level, we saw it with sanchez and de gea and how that affected sancho and varane coming and what they could ask for.
Look at Madrid with Ronaldo, had they kept him another few years and got his juventus level combined with the rest of the side they had, they might have won another champions league, 4 in a row potentially. But flo didn't budge and he sold him, they could have been like Barca and given Ronaldo a ludicrous contract but it would have encouraged others.
Being a well run club doesn't come about by magic, it means making financially prudent decisions even when they aren't the easy decisions, because if you're only financially prudent until a player gives you an ultimatum then immediately relent, that's how you end up with two league cups and a europa league to show for a billion pounds in transfer fees and feck knows how much in wages over thr same period