Only having experienced players as a small club is unsustainable because it’ll catch up with you and you will end up being one of the 3 worst teams when it does. The money runs out after however many years of paying for experience, you lose the edge you had, or some players all leave on free transfers or get crocked at the same time and you can’t afford to deal with it. It’s alsay been this way. The top clubs can afford it, but we can’t operate as a top club. The wage bill tells you we have been, but down where we are you have to develop players and sell them on, as we did with Bolasie, Zaha to Man U before that and Clyne before that.

We and Parish lucked out on AWB and hopefully that’s one step to turning a corner, because even if it is used to pay back owner loans, it could mean money is available in future windows that wouldn’t have been. It’s also meant that Parish can be stronger vs bids for Zaha.

There is a long road to sorting this out or the alternative is adding to it and if we do get relegated it could be really damaging or limiting to any revival.

There's logic to what you say, but I find the alternative convincing.

1. It's a fine line between a young team with sell on potential and one which just isn't good enough for the challenge here and now. That line is too fine for safety.

West Ham had probably the last great generation of home grown talent when a side with ferdinand, lampard, Carrick, defoe, Cole and Johnson got them relegated. All the sell on value in the world doesn't matter then. Southampton have produced more than anyone recently and have been incredibly lucky to stay up at least twice. The idea that they have any sort of model is highly questionable. They've had absentee owners who have somehow got away with cashing in at every opportunity.

2. A selling club is a feeder club is a club without pride.

Players like Mane, Pelle and Van Dyke performed for Southampton when it suited them. Then when they didn't get a transfer they wanted they literally went on strike. Newcastle had the same issue when Pardew built a great side up there. Ba, Cisse, Cabeye and Tiote (rip) all threw their toys out in a major way when they decided it was time to move on and up. They decided by the way, not the club. The leading players in the dressing room all on strike, or at least sympathetic to those who were. You know why? Because it went with the culture. Using the place as a stepping stone becomes the only reason anyone is there. Nobody cares beyond that, and everyone knows it.

3. Experienced players are actually pretty cheap.

We got Tompkins and Kouyaté for about 10m each. Dann for a couple of million. Bournemouth spent double that on ide and Solanke just because of the 'brand' - young, English and from the academy of a big club. Both are currently looking useless. It's like anyone under 21 might be the new Pele and anyone over 26 is just a dead weight. Sometimes the lower the sell on value the cheaper the player.

There's logic to what you say, but I find the alternative convincing.

1. It's a fine line between a young team with sell on potential and one which just isn't good enough for the challenge here and now. That line is too fine for safety.

West Ham had probably the last great generation of home grown talent when a side with ferdinand, lampard, Carrick, defoe, Cole and Johnson got them relegated. All the sell on value in the world doesn't matter then. Southampton have produced more than anyone recently and have been incredibly lucky to stay up at least twice. The idea that they have any sort of model is highly questionable. They've had absentee owners who have somehow got away with cashing in at every opportunity.

2. A selling club is a feeder club is a club without pride.

Players like Mane, Pelle and Van Dyke performed for Southampton when it suited them. Then when they didn't get a transfer they wanted they literally went on strike. Newcastle had the same issue when Pardew built a great side up there. Ba, Cisse, Cabeye and Tiote (rip) all threw their toys out in a major way when they decided it was time to move on and up. They decided by the way, not the club. The leading players in the dressing room all on strike, or at least sympathetic to those who were. You know why? Because it went with the culture. Using the place as a stepping stone becomes the only reason anyone is there. Nobody cares beyond that, and everyone knows it.

3. Experienced players are actually pretty cheap.

We got Tompkins and Kouyaté for about 10m each. Dann for a couple of million. Bournemouth spent double that on ide and Solanke just because of the 'brand' - young, English and from the academy of a big club. Both are currently looking useless. It's like anyone under 21 might be the new Pele and anyone over 26 is just a dead weight. Sometimes the lower the sell on value the cheaper the player.

Unfortunately it seems that Everton and Wolves both now have megabucks owners and so I foresee a shift towards 8 "guaranteed safe" teams (top 6 plus these two). Which is bad news for us as we're now battling to avoid being 3/12 instead of 3/14.

Thanks all for continuing this interesting discussion.

I'm not advocating a strict policy of only signing senior players, although we could debate whether that might actually be a good idea. I was simply arguing against the idea of a preference for younger ones where that preference comes from resale value rather than whether they are part of the very strongest 11 we can arrange right now.

The really notable thing is that a few of you feel we should have a 'transfer strategy'. I question that such a thing can actually exist. We aren't Man City. We will always need to be flexible and responsive in the short term to what the team needs right now, because that only has to go wrong a tiny bit and the whole thing crumbles. Our experience in this league has shown that the greatest need is often unexpected until the time, and can't really be planned for two or three years in advance.

Apart from the mad trolley dash straight after promotion the club has actually done a good job of targeted signings to strengthen the team where it was weakest at the time. That is the only 'strategy' worth worrying about as far as I can see. Always has been and always will be.

If the solution to today's problem happens to be a kid in our youth team then that's great, and the club have put a massive effort in to the academy to increase the chances of that happening, but the idea that instead of starting out by saying 'We need a new left back, who is the best one we can get for the budget' we would sit there and say 'Never mind what the team needs, the squad doesn't have enough resale value so let's go and get the best player we can who is under 20' is dangerously overthinking it. This resale value idea has taken grip to such an extent that as I said in an earlier post, any player under 20 has an artificially high value now anyway. The whole of Western Europe is scouring every part of Africa, Eastern Europe and wherever else looking for players now. There is no untapped market. We aren't failing to think hard enough about it, it's just not the great idea it might once have been, and that's without the fact that you'll always end up with far more misses than hits.

As has been correctly pointed out, we start every year knowing we are one of 12 to 14 sides who might end up in the bottom three, and the margins are too tight to take a single liberty. The idea that we might sign anyone other than the best available option to give the team what it needs right now is almost negligence. If we hadn't signed Dann, Puncheon, Cabeye, McArthur, Tompkins, PVA, Sakho and even Benteke then we'd have gone down.