You say we are overpaying like we are going in and offering double what the selling team wants. It's a sellers market. The prices are similar across the board. What it boils down to, is its a player you don't want, which like I say, is fair enough. A players value is set by the selling team in most of these cases. If you want a particular player, you have to pay the price.
Now, at the moment, Brands has apparently tried to get 1 of our targets for less than the asking price, and is now being criticised for that. He literally can't win.
People will point to other teams paying less for other players. The reasons for this are numerous. The player may be unproven at the point of being signed, and is therfore seen as a gamble. The buying club may have more pulling power, which counteracts the strength of the position of the selling club, knowing that the club and player could call their bluff and eventually lose an asset for less than the low bid, like what happened when we sold Rooney. Again though, this would assume, given our stature, that the player we are signing, and the club we are signing him from, would be that much lower down the food chain than we are, which again, would have fans asking questions. And that's without even considering competition for his signature.
Essentially, what you want Brands to do is to Jedi mind trick all other clubs to ignore the players we want to keep, buy our junk for more than they are worth, sell us their best players for buttons and trick other teams into not competing with us for signings. You want us to sign good, high quality players with experience from top teams, for prices of young unproven players from smaller leagues, and somehow reduce the wage bill and compete within the ridiculous, unfair, and rigged FFP system.
In short, it's not that Brands that is failing in his job. It's that the job you want him to do is impossible to do, certainly at a club of our size, in a league as competitive and high profile as ours, in as short a time as you are willing to give him to do it.