All of that can be wiped out with a single year of expensive but non performant recruitment.

They have gotten here on the back of careful but performant big investments (White, Rice, Havertz), relatively cheap and performant deals (Trossard, Gabriel, Odegaard) and ridiculously performative low cost assets (Saka, Martinelli, ESR, Nketiah, Balogun)

Obviously, that approach will need to change to more of big investments now but it’s absolutely strategically smart to be careful here as any non performant big deal has a huge impact. They have not found justifiable options yet beyond Rice and Havertz (right age, experience mix)