It might just reflect the difference in difficulty between regaining our rightful position as the fourth to sixth best team and actually making it into the top three which we have never achieved historically.
Of course it's difficult, bloody difficult especially when two of the five teams we're trying to overtake openly cheat.
But I do think a change in strategy is needed. We pursued a buy low, sell high and quick strategy from circa 2003-2013. This worked to propel us from mid table irrelevance to the top 6. The sale of Kyle Walker was the dying ember of this strategy.
This began to wind down after we sold Bale and from circa 2013 - 2019 we pursued a buy medium, sell very slow and very reluctantly strategy which worked because lighting struck twice with the combination of Poch and Mitchell building a superb team very quickly and cost effectively, which temporarily raised us into the top 4 if not higher.
Then came the new stadium. Our newfound financial power meant that our existing strategy had to morph into buy high, be unable to sell, because everyone we approached fleeced us for tens of millions more than the player was worth and meanwhile the player themselves joined on mega wages. None of these players improved us one iota. Some helped us tread water, nothing more. We also handicapped ourselves by adding to this strategy a demand that the player in question should be starry eyed about playing for Spurs. A naive and arrogant approach that completely forgot or ignored how we became a top 6 side in the first place.
This has been the case for every single big money signing we've made since 2019, with perhaps cases to be made in support of Romero, VDV, and Kulusevski.
The rest, which includes Richarlison, Simons, Solanke, Gil, Gray, Kudus, Porro, Johnson, Ndombele and Lo Celso, have had negligible impact relative to their cost to the club.
