Interesting.Yes - I listened to a football podcast where they discussed football finance throughout Europe following an academic study & some large scale number crunching. The somewhat surprising conclusion they came to was that money spent on transfer fees had a relatively small correlation with success ..... far more important was wages. It seems that big transfers more often than not are just not cost effective in terms of added value.
The implication is that it's much better to spend the money on wages to attract, develop and retain players ..... and presumably also selling on players at a profit to repeat the process. If our board is 'data driven' as they say then I'm sure they'll be well aware of this - and as you say can only imagine them spending large sums (for us) on players with genuine development potential.