It may not be Commolli's fault but it would be a flaw in the system.
I would've thought that for each transfer window they have a set budget. They'll also have an annual wage budget and maybe even a 3-4 year projection/budget of wages given the contracts in place.
Kenny surely has the final say on which players he wants. If Kenny also has the final say on what price to pay and what salary a player is worth then what's the point of Commolli other than a glorified chief scout and secretary to Kenny?
Basically, it seems the picture isn't clear and hence why the cock up in the prices we've paid.
I don't think that Kenny has any part of the decision-making process regarding wages for instance. That would definitely be Commolli's department.
Think of it this way. You have 80m budget. You need 5 players, you need to make sure you get all 5, and you want to do your best to make sure they all work because your squad has no real cover for these 5. That puts you on a hiding to nothing in the transfer market, because you can't really afford to gamble on foreign players that might not adapt to the English conditions and the English game (or who take 6 months to adapt - not every foreigner takes to the league the way Suarez and Torres did). You *will* end up paying too much for the targets you want because you will do your best to make sure no one else signs them first (or delays the deal by a few weeks that the player could have spent getting acquainted with your existing squad). Therefore our targets were players proven in the league, and we were prepared to pay over the odds for them just to make sure they got signed.
A lot of people are very negative regarding our transfer activity last year, but I'm much more relaxed about it because we were walking into a seller's market with big pockets and we weren't prepared to gamble (either on weaker or unjustifiable players, or on the chance of missing our first pick). That made us lame ducks.
Everyone knows (or should know) that Torres would be sold for 15m more than whatever it was going to cost us to sign Carroll. We were spending Chelsea's money to buy him, though quite frankly someone should have heard alarm bells at breaking the transfer record for a guy who'd spent only 6 months in the EPL and was injured. It would also be nice if people remembered that Redknapp offered 28m for the player, and Mike Ashley knew he could squeeze another few million by rejecting our offer of 30m.
We could have signed no one (or a bunch of Rafa-esque gambles) and no one can say we would be better off without the benefit of hindsight. Suarez could have taken 4 months to adapt, in which case we would probably not have finished in the top 10 last season. It's a lot of ifs, buts and maybes, and I'd prefer if people stopped bringing up the transfer fees - they're not the whole picture.
