Everything looks obvious in hindsight. Every player signed by every club in the world could in theory have been purchased earlier in their development for less. It's a weird stick to beat the club with.
The advantage we have being in the league at the top of the tree is that we can afford to delegate a lot of the hard work to clubs across the continent.
It's far easier to sign from 70 or 80 clubs across Europe on the rung below us, because that's 70 or 80 scouting teams looking at unearthing these kinds of players rather than just our own.
We also don't need to sign the misses, which we would've signed if we took all the risk.