Quite.... But it was spent never the less......
If the complaint morphs into being that we didn't spend when we had yet to have such a cash injection (during the time when the stadium was still being built) that would be a vastly different complaint. Did ENIC refuse to gamble on success when our position of strength coincided with the stadium build? Sure........
However, I find relative inaction such as this past January and the gaps left last summer far less explicable than the above (particularly for an investment company who's investment's value is in danger of dwindling.)
Personally I think what Levy's lack of investment over the Poch era (especially the final 3 years) was complacency of the highest order and he wasted a golden opportunity to cement our status as a top club and win silverware.
If we hadn't lucked into Kane, or been as good as we were, Levy would've invested
significantly more in the squad to try and get us back into the Champions League over that period, even with the stadium being built. Instead, he felt he could be cheap in the market since Poch was overachieving, and didn't recognise how lucky he was. For me that's far worse than what's going on at the moment, and most of the current fall-out is simply the long term knock-on effects of Levy failing to support the squad under Poch and then making a load of knee-jerk, short-term decisions in the post-Poch years.
In the past few years we've been one of the biggest net spenders in world football. It's miles away from the penny-pinching of the Poch era in terms of overall spending.
The problem is no longer the lack of investment, it's the messy squad-building, priorisiting opportunistic buys over smart buys, spending big on fees rather than salaries, swinging between managers with completely different styles, lacking a coherent footballing vision - our issues are more down to poor decision making than lack of overall spending.
Contrary to popular opinion, I actually think the board are being quite smart and disciplined by waiting until the summer to make
the right signings rather than just getting who is available in Jan. If we get relegated then we're fucked ofc, but as long as we can survive, we'll be able to do much more with our money in the summer than we could in Jan. But regardless of that, unless we sort out the DoF situation and get someone good in above Lange, we're gonna continue to be a mess.
Get in a proper DoF, sack Frank, demote or sack Lange, and start afresh in the summer with 3-4 serious signings on high wages that genuinely fix the squad. That's what we need.