There is very little that £ cannot buy providing you have enough of it & spend it wisely.
It's important to know the value of ambition/success as well as the price of it.
My bold.
You can throw as much money at something as you like. It is using some of that money to employ folk that know how to use it that is the important thing.
Dave Brailsford has a knack. He can look at a situation, identify what works and what doesn't and then build a team that knows how to make the failing aspects work.
Exactly this.
Dave Brailsford is about excellence. You don't need pots of money for that, it just helps you buy more excellent things.
He would have improved British Cycling with or without pots of cash because he has an attention to detail and improves the small, but meaningful, details (as part of his "aggregation of marginal gains"). Obviously those gains, on a tiny budget, would have been less, as would the medal tally, but he would have made gains, it's in his nature.
The cash allowed him to make more marginal gains (bike development and so on).
I have heard several times that Head Coaches from other sporting disciplines are now being granted audiences with his Holiness DB. That's as it should be. He comes from a cycling background (and refuses to leave it to coach elsewhere) but his techniques and overall approach seem eminently transferable and generic.
I see "Team America - F*** Yeah!" have recruited Jamie Staff in order to try and reproduce the Brailsford effect.
But yes, as much as I don't agree with all this King Arthur stuff, DB deserves a tap of the royal sword as much as anyone else who's received it, he's made us the world's leading achievers in something. That's tough to do and it raises the spirits of the nation a notch or two.
We need more excellent people in charge.