In 1992, Manchester United promoted a group of academy kids. By 1999 they had won the treble and become the richest club in the world.
That was not luck. It was a model. Build talent rather than buy it. Let a dressing room enforce its own standards before the manager has to. Turn that identity into commercial pull, and feed the money back into the team.
The uncomfortable question for most clubs is not "can we afford to develop talent?" It is "can we afford the churn of buying it every summer?" Build-over-buy is slower and harder and far more durable.
The clubs and the companies that last are rarely the ones that spent the most. They are the ones that built the machine that made spending optional. United had that machine for a decade, and most of their rivals are still trying to buy one.