I don’t think the top clubs are foolish. You generally speaking can’t win leagues with too many players in development. Therefore the big clubs have to wait and buy the finished article.Surely this is the model. Sign youngster, develop into potential superstar, sell on to foolish club who cannot develop stars themselves, throw in raw talent who is likely to be better than previous player to repeat the process
The issue we have is the next raw talent can’t always be better than the last player.