You're right though, but I think for differing reasons. Chelsea just don't really have a great youth policy in terms of picking up lower league players, they pick up a few starlets and loan them straight back out overseas, but by and large, they don't spend much these days on British players at all (I know!). City can afford to cherry pick the biggest young players, see Sturridge, SWP, Adam Johnson, etc. They have, arguably once or twice in players like Rodwell. Most Everton fans I know had already resigned themselves to the fact that the lad wasn't going to push on to be a big player, he'd had a great start to his career and then two years where he stagnated, but City bought him on the back of his initial potential and they grossly overpaid for the pleasure.
United do buy British youth but they tend to price everyone out the market when doing so - no other English clubs at the times in question would have paid what they paid for Rooney, Ferdinand, Shaw, Young, Carrick etc.
I think the closest is probably Spurs, and yeah look where they are, so it's a gamble of a policy, but then Spurs haven't really had the "luxury" of being able to spend 75m on Lallana, Downing and Carroll - With some of those fees it was almost like a really fucking naive way of trying to play with the big boys, like we're saying "look at us", we can spend £30m on an English player, like United were doing 10 years ago, only they were identifying the right player, we're dressing up players worth half the fee as pedigree.
