Top post by Red Heaven. Anyone who argues that money isn't crucial to the PL are kidding themselves big time. Do you really think that if Abramovic hadn't bought Chelsea, they would have achieved anywhere near what they have. And suprise, suprise. Abramovic started getting bored, didn't like Scolari and stopped giving him money and look what's happened. I'm not syaing money is the be all end all, but one thing is for certain as Red Heaven's post shows. We are punching above our weight.
Few have said that if we have a good enough scouting team, money isn't that important, pointing to the examples of Skrtel and Agger. Well I think we all know in this day and age, players are getting labelled the 'next Zidane' or 'next Maradona' far too easily and pretty much every top team in europe is lurking around for these top talents. Players like Agger, Skrtel are pretty rare commoditties. The thing is if rafa did sign one of these fairly unknown commodiites and they did not perform, I can only imagine the abuse he'd get from left right and centre.
If you look at the players with 'potential' of both sides that were bought and not bred from their youth system, I think we'd go with Babel, Lucas, Ngog, Zl Zhar, Insua. Man Utd have Anderson, Nani, Tosic and the Silva brothers. We can already see the difference of money they have in 'potential' players as opposed to us, and if you keep on spending 10m+ for these players, one of them will eventually turn out to be really good and that happened to be Ronaldo. As yet the list that I put up above haven't shown anywahere near their potential bar maybe Insua and Rafael. who are still new on the scene.
I think at the end of the day, one thing is for certain. If we lose Gerrard, Torres, Alonso we will struggle fact. If United lose Rooney, they replace him with Tevez, Berbatov, Ronaldo the list goes on. Rafa had to spend in 'squad' players when he came because he had such a weak foundation, he had to build it up whereas Whiskey Nose already had a strong foundation and could have the luxury of adding a few very expensive players. I think if Rafa were given a few years extra, we could catch up to this point and that is what we should be striving for. Not adding 6 'squad' players and the occcasional star on the team in the summer, but to spend the possible 30m on 1 star and possibly 2 or 3 rising stars for lower costs instead of spreading the budget around. For this to happen, Rafa had to first build a team where everybody is atleast half decent (not Biscan, Zenden, Diao, Traore) and so on.