I've explained we should invest and adopt the Cortese model regarding youth. The lack of breakthrough players is criminal.

I'd recall Sorloth before giving Sturridge or Carrol a contract, let alone look at the youth: pick the highest scoring striker from the youth team and promote him rather than set fire to 2 million pounds by even entertaining Sturridge.

I’d be a bit chary of signing Sturridge when he’s managed less than half the games played by Darren “Sicknote” Anderton. Someone on YouTube described him as being made of Weetabix.
Wiki lists Sturridge as being 6’2” which surprised me.

The top 5 scorers in the league last year were 26, 29, 27, 30 & 32. Why are people so quick to write off experience?

I am not saying by any stretch of the imagination that Sturridge is not injury prone, I do feel he's not quite as bad as made out though. I'm not sure that getting a 29 year old on a free, one that has 30 caps for England, is the worst call for a team like ours. If he played 15 games next season and scored 7 or 8 goals that would be worth the £2m signing on fee and in comparison to value for money versus Benteke, Sorloth etc. is good as far as I'm concerned.

Have we?

COYP

Of course, I agree. But that solution delivers in the future. We also need solutions now. I agree we won’t be buying 4 top players. More likely probably 2 and maybe a potential player or 2 or 3.

COYP

But the whole Southampton model you're quoting relied on finding underpriced players... They lost Alderweireld and replaced him with VVD for like £12m which was way below market rates. Mane etc also cost them peanuts. You can't argue for the Southampton model and then also argue that you can't find cheap hidden gems. The issue is that we've not adopted a policy of buy low sell high for our whole PL stay - we've instead bought 'proven' (or allegedly proven in Benteke's case!) players in their prime and then sucked up their best years such that there is no resale market for them.

On another note, this is the tip of the iceberg from Southampton. You can add Alderweireld, Bale and Shaw to that list. If they could have kept them all they'd have a CL standard side...

The flawed assumptions here are:-

1) Thinking Southampton had much to do with these players leaving. VVD, Lallana, Lovren and Wanyama all forced their way out. As did the Ox to a lesser extent. The best you can do is have their contracts sewn up so that when they do leave you can get big money for them and then hope that when you roll the dice and reinvest, the scouting department continues to get more 'hits' than 'misses'.

Southampton's thrived despite the sales for a good few years because they swapped out the likes of Alderweireld for VVD and Lallana for Mane. The recent struggles are due to the new crop of reinvestments not panning out coupled with some questionable managerial choices.

Its swings and roundabouts - without owners who can pump in vast cash (a la Wolves and Everton) you either buy high on proven commodities and then sell low (which is what we've done to date) or you buy low and sell high. Neither is 100% sustainable. The former runs out of cash to keep going at that pace (ie, what's happened to us). The latter suffers from what happened to Southampton in getting too many misses in one crop.

2) The second flaw is in assuming that you can keep them all due to monetary and wage bill constraints. There is no way Southampton's infrastructure could support paying all the above listed players on what they are now all currently earning.

Hrolf in particular and a couple others on here think that we can, in some way, do what Southampton couldn't and blindly keep all these theoretically pissed off players that want to move onto bigger things, while increasing the wage bill to Man City levels and with a comparatively tinpot ground and investors.

FWIW, I don't actually think AWB or Wilf are at the stage of forcing their way out (yet). Nonetheless, we will be obliged to sell them eventually and in AWBs case I reckon sell high whilst his fee is at its absolute zenith.