With Modric, wasn't it a case of Tottenham essentially refusing to sell him (for anything under a wildly inflated price) to Premier League teams?
Chelsea had an offer knocked back around that same period of 45m, and I don't think it was just the London rival dimension (added to that, Levy's still reluctant to deal with United after the Berbatov affair, which is going to make any potential Kane deal particularly difficult unless new owners are set on him as a real inaugural statement signing).
Similarly, apparently an offer was accepted for Bale, but only at around 18-20m more than Madrid paid -if it had been SAF still as manager instead of Moyes, maybe that could have swung it....
The ones who are really disappointing are those where the player was clearly interested and even Glazer parsimony shouldn't have seen us lose out, but got highjacked by administrative incompetence in terms of negotiating or pulling the trigger - Caicedo, Haaland when still in Norway (and then again at Salzburg to some extent -if they had faith in the project, why not accept the release clause and gamble on being in a position to renegotiate in a year to raise it significantly).
I think Kendry Paez is going to be another akin to the above - already playing men's football and with excellent awareness/technical attributes, and even with the hype, he's not going to be hugely expensive when buying/offering compensation at his age, Chelsea are in major flux and can't sincerely claim that Potter's likely to be in post come 2 years down the line when Paez is able to officially move or what the project is going to look like, whilst with ETH we're virtually guaranteed to be challenging, to be rationally integrating players into the team and with a defined pattern of play, Paez can expect top-level targeted coaching etc...