See, I disagree personally, not to say I'm right mind. Just looking at the below:
Bentley
Hunt / Mawson / Kalas / Dasilva
Nagy / Lansbury / Massengo
Semenyo / Diedhiou / Wells
That to me is a team that will not win the league, but could get promoted, and that's just a random 'best' XI, missing out a fair few others (Weimann, Moore, Williams, Paterson, etc). A lot of the recruitment is based on potential and some of the players have bags of it but might not be anywhere near that yet.
On that front, I think the club has sort of done it right - we don't have the biggest budget and we're not the most attractive club in the league so we have to do it differently. Player sales and the stature of some of these youngsters suggest we're at least on a decent path regarding that, not to mention the youth players getting brought through too.
It's a clever way of doing it, ideally you'd get the right manager in and as the players all reach their best together, you then have a partly ready-made PL team. But you need the right manager for that to work.
Just to be clear, I'm not a fan of Ashton. He epitomises everything that frustrates me with people at work, the business lingo and all that stuff. But he's clearly done well as a negotiator, and bagged the club millions. It sounds like his range of responsibilities is too broad, particularly if it's interfering with management, but there should be a place for him at the club for him to do what he does best for City. Though that does mean paving way for a 'proper' Chief Scout, Director of Football, etc rather than giving him free reign. I'm not sure that SL or him will ever be willing to do that.