Cheers for the reply mate nothing I'll disagree with there was just pondering if there was something more than the obvious points behind it because it's hard to not be a focal point when thinking about the club.
Totally with you on Bentaleb. People can debate how worthwhile he is / is it a signing of intent etc but he'd help the home grown quota and like you say he knows Poch and they appear to have made up.
On his talent though it's not like his only use would be to help the HG status. He's an established and arguably key midfielder for a Schalke team that aren't mugs. In a 3 man CM and feeling like he's had a second chance to come home I believe he's excel. He'd offer what we would of wanted from Rabiot without any of the hassle.
Would you feel disappointed if I rephrased my original question to purely young British talent.
Of all the calls I've seen on this forum the one I can't fault the logic of is that every single window we should of been buying cheap young English talent. Hindsight may make some of look like fools later but there's a few young British lads we could of been buying and working on developing in house which may have saved us millions come the summer.
I do appreciate that we did appear to go all in for sancho so there are some signs but it's disturbing the lack of foresight to me.
Glad its not just me who would quite like Bentaleb to return, he's a key player for a decent German side and became a fixture at CM for us, so he'd be a decent acquisition - of course there may be others better around but a lot who are not and we'd not to have to wait a season for him to bed in as others might need. And that to me is a key point, as well as we know what we are getting.
I think we missed a few decent options after Dele, partly because other clubs started looking at the lower leagues big time, Leicester, Everton and Bournemouth included. which meant players like Lookman and Brooks went elsewhere (I understand ManCity wouldn't sell Sancho to a British club - otherwise he'd have been a natural for us) . And I think it would have been good to spend £10m or so each TW to bring in one of those as whilst some won't pay off others will become good squad players if not better - and same argument for bringing through some more of our Academy players (Roles for example) either by loaning out or playing them a bit in first team.