It's literally the only meaningful statistic. Without taking into account how much sales contributed to purchases it's impossible to determine how much was actually invested.
It's literally not.
Net spend is a part of how most clubs finance signings, which is fair enough, but it's not very often it's actually valuable in terms of looking at it to evaluate how much the team was actually strengthened. Gross spending gives a much better picture, even though you still have to look behind the numbers. In most cases, you get rid of players you don't want at the club and you sign improvements. Is Timo Werner less of a £50mill investment because Chelsea sold Morata for £65mill? Is he a downgrade, nope. Chelsea haven't spent an absolute fortune on new players to improve their first team? Apparently not, because they've sold a lot of other dross, great.
Oh, our net spend was only £28mill this one season. Great, it was offset by a disaster of a player that refused to go on tour because he wanted to sort out his move to PSG, in a summer where we essentially signed half a starting 11 with Depay, Darmian, Schneiderlin, Schweinsteiger and Martial, throw in Romero as well. Who the feck else were we actually going to sign that summer? We still invested close to £105mill in first team players, a summer after we spent £150mill on half a fecking starting eleven in different positions.
The funny thing is that people are so selective when it comes to how far beneath the numbers they're willing to look, based on nothing else than what they've already decided, essentially it's all confirmation bias followed by complaining about people doing exactly the same just with opposite views.
Someone can easily go on transferleague, look at the net spend for the past 5 seasons and see that Manchester United have the second highest net spend in this period, only behind City. Or that overall since 2003, we're pretty much par on Chelsea's net spend, second highest.
Great, there's feck all of a problem then, we're spending loads, both gross and net.
But it's not that simple.
Just as it's not as simple as simply looking at net spend when we finish top 4 and when we don't.
If you're going to somewhat serious about the issue, you need to look behind those numbers to look for if there's anything else than finishing top 4 that could influence it, a minimum would be the changes in managers. Moyes, Van Gaal, Mourinho and Ole, 4 managers over a short period of time, there's always going to be a decent chunk of players going in and out, which will naturally offset our spending. Obviously the natural question in relation to that would be if all managers were simply sacked for not finishing 4th. My personal opinion is that they were all sacked because they were having a detrimental effect on the club and that it was only going to get worse.
) that would be!