I know it's not sexy and everyone thinks we're going to sign some 17 year old for 5m who turns out to be the next Messi but realistically we have been successful over the past decade because we've adopted a slightly contrary viewpoint and found an area of the market which is undervalued.
Most teams go nuts over young starlets and the prices are too high; meanwhile good professionals who are 30 are undervalued because of the line of thinking some people have expressed in this thread.
When you are a (relatively) poor team you have to compete in the less competitive area where assets are undervalued rather than trying to get in the pool with hundreds of other teams who are desperate to over-pay for the next big thing.
All of our "value" signings (Lescott, Baines, Cahill, Arteta, Pienaar) had something on them which made them undervalued (playing in lower league, bad experience with a high profile club) so we saw undervalued players there when others looked away chasing "the next big thing."
It's not really complicated -- teams that retain their best players through their prime will succeed while teams which sell their best players and try to replace them will eventually die off because it's a house of cards. House of cards aren't good.
Sell to buy doesn't work because of risk of ruin. A few bad buys (which every team has) and you are back to square one. A team with our lack of funds would have to be practically perfect with every buy and that's not realistic. Sooner or later you're going to sign a Bily and a Kroldrup (maybe a Carroll) and you're out millions and have to basically start all over again.
Obviously you don't ignore youth (and we haven't as we've built an elite academy) and nor do you ignore a young player even if the price is high if you think it's good value (Fellaini). So you have to be flexible. However the main core should be finding undervalued players and right now one of the best areas for that is 29+.
Young players are lottery tickets and we aren't rich enough to be spending a lot of our allowance on long-shots.
1st paragraph - Totally the opposite thinking to mine i'm afraid. Selling players in their prime before they go downhill is common sense as is signing 2 good younfer players to improve the team.
There are numerous books/articles etc. written which debunk that line of thinking. You may well disagree with them but you should give them a read. Soccernomics is a good start (although only a few chapters are relevant to this discussion -- more a library book than a buy). It's "common thinking" by football fans but I don't agree with the "sense" part.
Let me ask you this: most teams below us in the league are in a sense "selling clubs." Very few have CL-level players who don't at some point get sold. So why hasn't it helped them leapfrog us in the league?
Surely they should take the cash they get from flogging off their star players and improve themselves? Sell one great player and buy two great players ... how could it ever fail? So who should we model ourselves after? Because they all sell ... why doesn't it help them? Meanwhile we sign Distin, Neville etc and have this tiny old squad ... and yet we beat them year after year after year. Does that not give you a second's pause that maybe their strategy doesn't work too well?
2nd para-- no obviously the team should get better (maybe not in the 1st year as the new players are integrated).
This line of thinking baffles me. There is no "should" ... managers buy the wrong players all the time. If we're talking about Baines ... one of the best LBs in the world ... the odds of getting better players than him (for 5-10m) are simply not very good. It's almost insane the level of rose-tinted glasses you need to think any team with any manager could nail two transfers that well. If we could sell Baines for 20m and buy four Baines for 5m of course we should do that ... but it's not realistic.
3rd para--In that case you add up the ages of our players who are actually near the pitch and then do the same for other teams...you'll find ours is one of the if not the oldest -- people have been commenting on this for months.
... and we finished above all the younger teams.
Moyes was perhaps a little too cautious in this regard (we all wanted to see Ross play more) but it baffles me how many people don't know that we didn't win DESPITE being old; we won BECAUSE we were old. Distin is better than pretty much any young defender in the entire world which we could afford. If you put Duffy (or some other youngster) in we ship more goals. Yes Duffy gets better faster and is worth a few more million but we suffer now. Do this across the pitch and we're suddenly a bottom half team with some valuable "assets" to sell in a fantastic "business model" that doesn't work (long-term) for a single team in the Prem.
If you want to stay in Euro contention the only way we should be getting younger is signing another 30 year old to replace Distin.
