If our policy is to buy young and up coming quality who are yet to hit their peak that represent value i can understand the signing of Tom Ince but for the life of me Sturridge at the 12m fee(reported) makes no sense at all. To get real value out of a system like this you need to be finding players like Agger who do not have a big reputation but the necessary quality thats how you get value for money.
that's fair enough, but right now we're short up front, and we're still setting up our scouting system, and we have to make a bit of a compromise. If Sturridge turns out well, he'll be cheap at the price. He's young, he's not going to be on insane wages, and 12 million quid is fairly reasonable, given what we've spent on players over the years. and if he doesn't set the world on fire, we can sell him on in a couple of years. We're not quite in a position to be hounding down the aggers just yet. Remember rafa was able to draw on his enormous knowledge of spain, and sign players he'd have been happy to sign for valencia. Some were raging successes like xabi, pepe, luis, torres. Some not so much.
From here on in our policy should be a mixture of youth(that have quality rather than a reputation) and players who have consistently proven their talent and worth and the higher scale of things. A perfect example of this would be Soldado of Valencia. He shows great quality and consistency but flies under the radar a bit and would not claim a massive fee. He is 27 so does that mean we rule him out? i certainly hope not.
I suppose it would depend on the sums involved. Soldado is 28 at the end of the season, he's under contract to 2017, is from valencia. He's a fine player but he wouldn't be cheap, which brings us onto your next point.
And for the young talent that represents value why not the likes of Moussa Sissoko . He is young talented and the fee would be fairly even as his contract hasn't long to go
I think that in the short term we need to start looking at players whose contracts are expiring. And then start lining up next years targets, and the year after based on contract expiry. It's amazing how many players in the last year of their contract can't bring themselves to sign another one and wind up at man utd. Andy carroll had just signed a new contract, jordan henderson and charlie adam had just start contracts, stewart downing had two years left, which is why he cost more than one year ashley young. but he was only ever going one place.
It's things like that that can help us get value for our money. not who would we like to get in an ideal world, but who can we get, and from that set of players, identify ones with the qualities and talent that they need.