It's also important to point out that we have massively slashed our wage bill in that same period, and that has enabled us to spend more of the transfer fee side of the equation. The cost across the length of a player's contract seems to be disregarded, but it's the total cost of a transfet that matters, not just one or the other.
The benefits of signing mainly young players is that they join on relatively lower wages, and you can adjust up as they begin to improve and fulfil their potential, or sell if they don't. The other factor, which Arteta mentioned in an interview he did in Spain a few week's ago, is that whilst it's true we've spent a lot of money in fees, it has almost exclusively been on players with big potential. Which is an investment startegy that goes beyond just trying to build a winning team, and if you're good at estimating a young player's growth curve, you can make an awful lot of money, on paper if nothing else, which is not inconsequential when valuing the club.
And we've been so exceptional at it that we now sit behind only City in terms of squad value (the only two clubd whose squads are valued at more than £1b) despite spending hundreds of millions of pounds less than them to assemble our squad, and having a much, much lower wage bill.
