Yeah but that's not to say they lost £100m worth of quality. The fee was hugely inflated, and it was all recycled back into the squad.
Well, either we were a one man squad or we weren't. I think we were, more or less, but that's always going to be the case with a team like us and a player like Bale - he was so good that we had to base our entire team around him, so naturally the rest of the team "suffered". We aren't Barca or Real.
And obviously the fee of our incoming transfers was inflated too. Lamela's fee was based almost entirely on his future potential, potential that might not be realised, and because they knew we had £100m to spend.
I think that, because his fee was so high, that it's easy to downplay just how good Bale is. He absolutely was our team, and we performed absolute surgery on our first 11 over the summer. Our performances haven't been good enough, but I think saying things like "they spent £100m lol" is ignoring a lot of context. This isn't like Man City or PSG or Anzhi - we had to sell our best player to do it, and we ended up revenue neutral (actually, we made a profit - thanks, Dempsey!)