Son was signed when we were in the Europa League.
Yup, and Son is probably the best player we have signed in the last 5 years - and probably the only 'star' player bought in the last 5 years, arguably with Dele, the others have generally been 'ok' players or poor (eg N'Jie and N'Koudou).
We've missed out on several very good players who we could have got in those last 5 years - Robertson (LB) from Hull who cost Liverpool £8m and Gomez (RB/CB) who cost Liverpool £3.5m from Charlton - both young players who if Spurs had bought them would have solved both our full back problems to day.
And in the same transfer window that we bought Aurier for £25m, Leicester bought Perreira for the same money. One has conceded 4 penalties in the last few years (the most of any current PL player), the other has won their clubs Player of the Year.
So sadly it comes down to poor buying of players over the last 5 years - shown by the fact that the majority of Spurs first choice X1 at the start of this season was here before Poch arrived.
And that's with us being in CL for 4 years
The money is there to spend, so if we can identify good players (and that is the issue) we can buy players in January and the summer. But we do need to shift some of those 'ok' players bought in the last 5 years, particularly those overseas trained as we have our full quota of them already - not necessarily easy as we tried to shift Wanyama in the summer (£13m fee agreed with Bruges and £65k pw wages apparently but Wanyama turned it down) and Aurier attracted AC Milan attention despite being injured but nothing came of it.
A couple of Club trained and HG player spots available to the right players though.
And whilst I don't often post tweets from other club supporters :
Poch needed to have been playing many more of Spurs youth and/or loaning them out for experience over the last 5 years. That and poor buying is coming back to haunt us.
Change those 2 things and this may be a blip, but it certainly wont sink us