SAF also bought a lot of guys for minimal funds at the time (see: Vidic, Evra, Hernandez, Heinze, etc) who all turned out just fine. Big money players turn into big money flops, low money players turn into low money flops. This is football. However, for every flop, there is a success, too. I don't feel £16m is too much for a first team player, and if he turns out a success, fantastic, if not, we've not spent that much money on him anyway. We can only buy the players who are interested in a team without immediate CL football at the moment, unless we go to PSG/City levels and pay wages through the roof, which we're probably already doing to some extent. Again, though, LVG sees something in him, so I'll reserve judgement.

I got curious after my last post where I mentioned being pretty happy with Jones/Smalling/Evans overall, and went through the stats for the PL games they played in the central defence positions.

Rio & Vidic: 44% Win, 22% Draw, 33% Loss (0.89 goals conceded per game)
R/V & S/J/E: 33% Win, 22% Draw, 44% Loss (1.44 goals conceded per game)
S/J/E & S/J/E: 73% Win, 9% Draw, 18% Loss (0.82 goals conceded per game) - includes one game with Jones/Carrick in central defence.

Basically we played better without Rio & Vidic than when we played with them. Considering that the goals conceded aren't too different between Rio & Vidic playing and S/J/E combinations but the win ratio is much higher, that also says the attackers played better without Rio & Vidic being present.

EDIT: Continuing on that... conceded goals for individuals.

Rio: 15 goals in 12 games (1.25)
Vidic: 25 in 23 (1.09)
Evans: 19 in 14 (1.36)
Smalling: 7 in 10 (0.7)
Jones: 20 in 16 (1.25)

And...

Evans when with Rio/Vidic: 9 in 6 (1.5)
Evans without Rio/Vidic: 9 in 8 (1.13)

Smalling when with Rio/Vidic: 3 in 4 (0.75)
Smalling without Rio/Vidic: 4 in 6 (0.67)

Jones when with Rio/Vidic: 12 in 7 (1.71)
Jones without Rio/Vidic: 8 in 9 (0.89)

EDITRA: Attachment showing off just how often Moyes changed the CB's. Mental.

cbs.png