Exactly. Atalanta is where they are because they trust their scouts to unearth the proper profiles and develop them into their system. We can't say we don't have money - we've outspent Atalanta tens of times in the last ten years, yet we've only won one Scudetto and some cups.
Look at Napoli. They bought a couple of relatively unknown players in the last couple of years while doing a massive revitalisation of the squad. Didn't spend that crazy money, yet now they have a squad that is probably on par with ours in terms of assets. Kim, Khvicha, Osimhen... that's 300M right there.
Let's face it - nobody cares about Coppas and Supercoppas. Nobody even cares that we were lucky enough to participate in the CL final. We had no chance. Yet, Atalanta is making profits and almost constantly in European spots while selling their best players yearly. Napoli has won as many Scudettos as we did in the last decade...
We are currently locked into thinking we're in the good ol' Moratti days of being a financial powerhouse. We are not and should've moved to a more Napoli/Atalanta-like model a couple of years ago already. Like it or not, the EPL owns European football. No one can compete. Without a stadium, our best bet is to sell and buy players smartly. Yet we are trying to be competitive, getting people with absolutely no resale value, which keeps us somewhat competitive, but it can only continue for so long. This isn't a valuable business model for us.
Getting 34-year-olds for 20-30M... trying to compete right now. Yeah, it might work for a couple more years, but we can't build on that. Getting 4-5 young players, like Samardzic, that we can sell two or three of them for massive profit in a few years is the way to go. Trust me, it pains me to I have to look at it this way, but this is the situation we're in right now. Hell, the reason we're afloat so far is that we've sold our best young players. Hakimi, could've actually sold Skriniar, Onana. And next year, yeah, probably we'll have to sell Lautaro, Bastoni, or Barella.
This is why I was a fan of getting someone like Balogun. If he flops, yeah, he has no resale value. But does Taremi or Arnautovic, who are marginally cheaper? If he booms, we have an 80M player on our hands. Rinse and repeat. Maybe once in a blue moon, we can have a good run in the CL and actually try to win it when the stars align, and we've somehow kept a decent core.