Man Utd have wasted similiar - yet could spend another £100 million in the summer whilst Everton spent £1.7 million and had to offload big earners and go cap in hand to the PL begging for no punishment.
Ultimately the difference - the top 6 can make as many mistakes as they like and never drop away - we cant.
Hence
@Saint Domingo point on Leicester - they have been absolutely perfect from top to bottom yet are only 1 bad transfer window or awful managerial appointment away from dropping off back into mid table - something the likes of Utd, Arsenal and Chelsea will never do and certainly never City/RS.
This league is an illusion - you have fans on here championing clubs like Brighton with perfect set ups.
The same Brighton that will never qualify for the Champions League never mind win anything.
It’s why I pay zero heed to any ‘we should have gone for this manager’ ‘look at what x has done at this club’ ‘look at the football y is playing within a few months, why can’t our manager do that’
They all end in failure. Bielsa the forum’s favourite last season is now fired, Potter is back in mediocrity, Wilder is in the championship, Dean Smith will be, Nuno soared and then got burned badly, you can throw all our managers in there, Rodgers is now falling back at Leicester, Hasenhuttl can’t sustain it.
Only two teams from outside the sky six have broken the top 4 since Abramovich took over Chelsea, and they are us in 04/05 and Leicester (who I’m convinced were probably doping) in their title win. That’s 18 years and no one else has even been close aside for Leicester under Rodgers.
Only one manager in PL history in this period outside of the top 6 has picked up a team in the lower regions of the table, improved them, and then consistently built on that improvement to challenge for Europe consistently. That was David Moyes.
One, in 18 years. For every other team no matter what manager, DOF, budget, academy output, owner, stadium, the end result has been the same. None of them can even maintain European qualification in the unlikely even they’re good enough to even get into the europa.
‘We should have gone for Bruno Lage though’ - no, a completely irrelevant shout, that Wolves team won’t make top 4 under him whatever he does and in a best case scenario they’re still where they currently are in three season’s times (because he’s been good enough to maintain performances whilst replacing his best players successfully). The most likely scenario though is he loses his best players to the top 6, he then either recruits badly or one his replacements gets injured, Wolves hit a rocky patch of results, and the media and referees are on them in a flash and loss after loss follows until Lage is fired with Wolves in the bottom half battling relegation and the owners unwilling to risk PL survival.
People will say it’s tin hat stuff but it’s happened to almost every manager at every club. They either move up in rare circumstances (Poch, Santo, Moyes) or they’re gone in a few seasons. Every time. All of them. Doesn’t matter what club.
So yeah our owner has made probably every mistake in the book, but if he hadn’t, we still wouldn’t be playing CL football. Will be interesting to see how Newcastle un folds but it wouldn’t surprise me if they made exactly the same errors, overspending on players the elite don’t want to try and close the gap on the elite even though the game is rigged against you by the elite.