I'm not saying we don't need any players, we clearly do.
I'm saying without knowing who is going, who is coming in (including manager), what wages will be released, etc, without knowing all that, then I think the club is wrong to immediately rule out signing a player.
Look, as an example, if we lose Rondon, Nyom, J-Rod, Gibbs, Dawson, Hegazi, Livermore, Barry, etc, that frees up a lot of wages right? It would also bring transfer fees into the club. Without knowing who we replace those players with and how much they cost then how do we know we can't afford Gayle? I'm not saying we replace all of those players with players on Gayle's wages but I'm pretty sure we could sign a young, pacey forward to complement Gayle and afford both if we have Rondon and J-Rod off the books. The alternative is losing Rondon and J-Rod and replacing them with two cheap strikers in the hope that one of them will score the goals we will need for promotion. Risky is it not?
Now what happens if we don't lose any of those players? Then spare wages and transfer fees are going to be much thinner on the ground and affording Gayle would be more difficult. And that's fair enough.
So without knowing all of that how can we be 100% sure we can't afford Gayle. How can we be sure we will get a decent replacement for a fraction of the price? Quite simply, we can't.
In my opinion, the club has set out it's stall to get fans used to small minded thinking. "Oh, we've got HRK as our main striker because we can't afford wages for anyone better". We will lose players this summer and the money will not be reinvested back into the squad in a serious way, let alone extra investment.
If there's one position on the pitch that you shouldn't try and cut corners on it is the striker. If you want promotion you need to score goals and win games. 20+ goals a season strikers are not easy to find, and they are not easy to find on the cheap.
I have ambition for Albion in that we are not a mid-table Championship side. I think we are better than that.