How long before we see the finance benefits of the stadium? I know it’s not the same but for me it seems that Arsenal never saw the finance boom from the Emirates. They just seem to be forever paying it off and selling stars.
I've highlighted my response to your point. Take the enormous points haul from 16/17 out of the equation and we're lagging miles behind City and Pool - with that gap likely to grow significantly as we still face both away from home before the end of the season. So no, I am not talking bollocks. You, like many other Spurs fans, seem to be incapable of grasping just how far we have regressed since that magnificent season - the only time I have watched Spurs knowing that as long as we brought our A game, not a team in the land could touch us. Our CB's and attack are still top class, but the areas I and many others have mentioned - CM and FB - are simply not fit for purpose: unless of course said purpose is challenging for Top 4 every single year. If that is the case, Poch and the players have been deliberately deceiving us and themselves by regularly talking about our supposed ability to be 'title challengers'. In other news, I'm sure you've all missed my delightful cloud of pessimism around here. Poor @Spurlock has been manning the misery trench on his own for far too long
Can you please carry on advising levy please. Your transfer policy is great. You need to also let him know that there's no point buying any players as the selling club always gets the better deal having seen the player train day in day out
The 'project' by definition is little more than vague platitudes aimed at impressing boards and getting fans and pundits excited. It sure as hell isn't serving to motivate the players to greater things so either they don't believe in it or it isn't real...take your pick. There are just too many unknown external variables affecting it beyond our control every season. For example, us qualifying for the CL as soon as Y2 of 'the project' was as much down to Chelsea, United and Liverpool being unexpectedly turd for a year as it was to do with us being 'ahead of the project'. Our relatively low points tally, failure to go top twice and poor showing in Europe and the domestic cups were the clearest indications that finishing 3rd after a 'title challenge' was an illusion created by the failures of our traditional rivals. And that's really the point that grinds me: if external factors align to make it possible for your internal 'project' to be accelerated, take full advantage of the situation and push onwards. We did that at the end of 2015/16 by dint of the young core improving with experience and with the addition of Wanyama. We haven't done it since.
Agreed with most of that but love Redmond, was more than entitled to react like that to that filthy rake from Sissoko. Not his fault that you lot lost your heads again... there's a word for that I believe
I am perfectly happy for us to buy players. We should buy the best ones we can afford. I’m simply pointing out that it’s not guaranteed to get better ones than we have now.
The issue is that the team got better ahead of schedule so therefore more expensive to improve. We are not permitted to spend cash we’ve not earned which limits who we can buy. The ffp rules don’t permit us to push on.
There’s always gems like Dele out there, at an affordable price. If we can’t afford the big bucks for proven players, then we have to adapt our strategy for the time being, to find players who fall into our current transfer policy. There’s been some amazing championship players this season who could have potentially made a difference to our overall squad and been pivotal in a rotation set up to get us through the injury crisis and fixture congestion we’ve faced. We signed nobody. Over 2 transfer windows. And haven’t sold enough of the deadwood quickly enough that could have released funds to not make FFP an issue. That’s the problem. Our last year (at least) of recruitment has been shambolic.
We have been a sell to buy club for as long as I can remember so I partly accept that point. But in that case the true inquisition is how or why we are so very bad at moving on players who clearly aren't good enough...and there are sadly quite a lot of them who have built up since the poor window post 15/16 when Wanyama was our only good signing. Injuries have made up the rest of the numbers. Even getting them off the wage bill would be a huge help for books balanced as carefully as ours. How many people at the club genuinely see a future for: Wanyama, Rose, Janssen, GKN, Lamela and Trippier? 6 senior salaries we could probably do without. We need a clearout this summer but I dread August coming around and we've sold Toby and Eriksen and managed to send Janssen out on loan to Crawley FC and the rest of them are still at the club.
Not spending any cash though will absolutely guarantee we don’t improve. If the board/ Poch felt we couldn’t improve the first XI due to financial restrictions then improve the squad. Squad players can be just as important in the long run.
Fans describing players who are responsible for our best ever premier league seasons as ‘Deadwood’ is over the top for me. Anyway if they are now that bad then they won’t raise much money.
At least three quarters of our squad are still getting better year on year. One or two signings could still help but it’s easy to sign dross by mistake. Would we really be stronger if we had sold Wanyama and Sissoko and bought Jorginho and Fred for example?
We’ll never know because we never tried. Yet what we do know is that not trying has now seen us stutter into a position where we may end up dropping out of the top four this season. If three quarters of our squad were getting better, I’m pretty sure this wouldn’t be the case. EDIT: The realism is, three quarters of our squad are probably either getting worse or stagnating.
The point I’m making is that we wouldn’t know even if we had tried. If we had sold Sissoko and bought say Fred, we would have all thought we had improved. Fred would doubtless have played better than Sissoko had played. He almost certainly wouldn’t have been as good as Sissoko has been this year. Improvement isn’t continuous, it is more like 5 steps forward then 3 back.
But what if we sold Sissoko and/ or Wanyama and signed Milinkovic-Savic? Or Frenkie de Jong? Or what if we signed long term target, Wilf Zaha? Standing still in football, which is what we’ve done, means we will never improve. There’s no ifs or buts to that. At least by bringing in players shows a willingness to improve. And for all we know, had we signed some players they could’ve had an effect like Alisson had for Pool instead of what Fred had for Utd.
