It is interesting. I remember a post I made in October/November last year (I think maybe during a discussion with
BlueBen?).. Obviously it was very disappointing that we didn't end up signing Sanchez after selling Suarez, and it was asked 'why didn't we then sign someone else instead?' - definitely a very fair question!
My response was that instead of just throwing money at everyone in the hope of landing anyone to be that 'Suarez replacement', we may have had a specific ranking of targets we were working our way through and whoever was next on that list for whatever reason wasn't available at the time (easy to imagine that list probably contained Sanchez, Firmino & Depay, all players in a fairly similar mould).
Perhaps we'd been given an indication by the club or the player's representative that while he wouldn't be available immediately, this player's contractual situation meant that his availability might change over the next 12 months? Who knows. We obviously paid the price for it in 2014/15 but if it meant we ended up with someone we actually wanted like Firmino or a Depay instead of our 7th or 8th option on that list then I can kind of understand the logic behind waiting.