According to a piece in the Telegraph, to reach the top 6, you need to be in the top 6 spenders for both transfers and wages.
If only we payed Dale Stephens £400k a week.
I'd like to know, but at the end of the day it doesn't really matter who spent what.
This piece from planetfootball.com looks at the correlation between amount spent and final league position.
https://www.planetfootball.com/in-depth/investigating-whether-link-transfer-spend-pl-position/...