This is the opposite of what happens now. Kids have to play everywhere to have a broader understanding of the game. It's the influence of Dutch total football and part of why we've ended up with sweeper keepers and ball-playing centre-halves.
After reading the minutes from the recent THST meeting with the board, it will be interesting to see how much we do have available to spend in the summer. This particular line quoted from Levy concerned me: "Funds were ring-fenced for the summer however not qualifying for Champions League would have an impact all round". I want to know what impact that is. Financially or with regards to the level of player we can entice? If the latter, understandable, players like Ndombele and Lo Celso may not have joined us if we weren't a CL side this season. Just like van der Vaart likely wouldn't have joined us either back then. Though if financially - which I expect it is - I don't like the sound of it, nor quite understand it. Not finishing in a CL position this season in theory shouldn't affect our summer spending because the money we've generated from this season's CL campaign should be available to spend this summer, it's the money we won't generate from next season's campaign that'll negatively impact potential spending for the 20/21 summer. Am I right in thinking that? If not please correct as I'm not going to pretend I'm a financial expert. If I were to ballpark what I think is a realistic figure for the summer, I'd say we should have around £70m-£80m to spend plus whatever we make from player sales. If we can then push that figure up to around £100m-£120m with departures, that in theory should be enough for a good RB, LB, CB and a backup striker with some change for maybe one of a DM/ GK/ another CB. If Skippy gets more game time and if Dier keeps looking like a footballer, a DM could probably take a back seat.
Spurs are run by a board of directors CK, ok Levy is the chairman but we don't know to what extent the rest of the board is instrumental in player decisions. I assume we use 'experts' to find potential players and then the board/Levy and the owner no doubt, decide on the financial side. This is the problem at every pro club the player experts v the finance experts. Venables knew his way around both aspects but it's unusual. The fan is always going to want the club to buy of course, but financial realities have to be faced as we know at Spurs only too well and clubs like Leeds who have paid a huge price for getting it wrong. From the semi finals of the CL to relegation and financial melt down in short order as they tried to build their squad for the level they had reached. Just consider Leeds were in semi finals nearly 20 years ago and have never been near our top division since. We shouldn't forget this when we moan about Levy being tight.
Your analysis makes sense DH but this comment "Funds were ring-fenced for the summer however not qualifying for Champions League would have an impact all round". I would assume Levy means that projections will be made about the financial implications of losing the CL funds and money will be set aside for that loss of income I think you can expect a loss of spending power this summer because of that.
Levy's always differentiating the spend on infrastructure. The stadium will be there, generating income long after you and I aren't. It made every good sense to build the stadium and the training facilities and to make them top notch. As Ndombele and Soldado and Paulinho prove, money spent on players is a gamble but betting the farm on being successful with holes in the squad and injured players counting as whole ones, is a bigger gamble, to you and me. There are risks that Levy will take and others that he won't. When it comes to spend on players, the overwhelming likelihood is that he won't take the risk. Expecting otherwise is like expecting the sun to remain in the sky all day and all night and for every day to be Christmas. This summer, we'll spend what he thinks is affordable and the fans, Mourinho and the press can do what they see fit. I doesn't matter if we agree with it, that's what's going to happen and he'll front it out. He said exactly that in the THST meeting.
You're right I think, but they need to remember what business they are in as well. They need to keep filling the stadium for example and you can't do that with a second rate squad.
We're at a cross roads. It looks like we're neither fish nor foul. Our Academy had a fallow period with Onomah, KWP, Edwards, etc. not making it. Chelsea buying up all the talent a decade or so ago is paying dividends in that regardand we really need Parrott, Tanganga, Cirkin and White to prove to be first team regulars. In the transfer market, Wolves and Leicester are buying players that we could/should have been in for. Everton have money to spend (although they've wasted an awful lot). Even West Ham are spending around our level. It looks as if we've taken our eye off the main part of the business - being a football club and that is going to cost us. Given we can't spend our way out of our current decline or fill all the gaps from the Academy, we're left to hope that we've got the manager right to coach us out of it...
That's exactly what he should do. We shouldn't overspend or risk the future of the club to rectify past mistakes. We need to be sensible with our budget and return to what put us in the strong position that we were in prior to recent balls ups. Despite the stadium and our general increase in revenue across the board, we still can't compete with a lot of the clubs around us. City, Chelsea, Man Utd and Liverpool can and will outspend us. Arsenal may or may not, depending on how badly their finances have become. Everton will spend similarly, though they've had quite a number of misses instead of hits. Chucking money at it won't work when others can do the same and more. We need to go after the Walkers, Bales, Eriksens, Dembeles, Sons and Allis that are in the position that they were in when we signed them. Buy prospects to fill out the squad and compete with the senior players, so that our squad can hold up over time. We stopped doing that and let the playing staff stagnate. Hopefully that's what we've started doing again with the signings this season. The holes need to be addressed and it needs to be done quickly. They need to be filled with intelligent transfers though and not just grabbing up the flavour of the month for massive money.
I'm not suggesting mad, unrealistic spending but we've steered clear of loan deals like Tielemans or Kovacic, because it was buy or walk away. It appears one dimensional. We could have bought young talent and loaned some out, like we did with Walker or Tom Huddlestone. Leicester have really shown us up at that and we were great at it. It's the 'One in, one out' lack of flexibility that gets me. FFP has a 3 year accounting period but we're balancing the books on a micro-time scale
However, what I am saying is the exact opposite: while in FIFA it is possible to drop a player wholly unlike anyone else into the team in there and they'll slot in perfectly, in reality that doesn't happen The reason why Bruno Fernandes has slotted in so well at Man Utd is quite simple: he's not an anomaly to their style of play, he's basically a like-for-like replacement for Pogba so they could drop him into the team and he'd hit the ground running, just like how Poch was able to drop Ndombele straight into the team and he hit the ground running (until he started picking up one knock after another, that is...) This is why Fazio was always destined to fail...actually, scratch that, the reason Fazio was destined to fail was because he was a short-term signing anyway, as Mateo Musacchio was the player we wanted to sign, but thanks to the usual third party bollocks his transfer fee ballooned so we had to look elsewhere at short notice
And what do think would happen if you dropped Bruno into; Burnley or Brighton or West Ham or Palace or Norwich or even Spurs? I'll hazard a guess : He would improve them. Regardless of their 'style' they would all benefit from someone who can be available to pass to and aware of who in front wearing a similar shirt can benefit the team most with ball. Its the heart of football and it works when you have time and presence of mind plus ball skills to carry it out.
On the last point I think there are two explanations: 1) If you sign a non-HG player without shipping one out then you have to pay both salaries which makes the investment case look a lot worse. 2) The loans for the new stadium will have covenants limiting other borrowings. By my calculations the new stadium improves our spending capability by about £80-100m a season, but it probably also limits it to that.
Not necessarily If he was dropped into the false nine role Dele's currently operating in he might chip in with some goals, but if he was dropped into central midfield alongside Lo Celso it would probably take three weeks before somebody was demanding we recall George Marsh from his loan at Orient and, if we have the time, we should sack Levy Meanwhile, dropping him into the West Scam team wouldn't necessarily improve them one iota, considering that's what people were expecting Lanzini, Yarmolenko, Snodgrass and (weirdly) Wilshere to do, yet in spite the various players being an improvement on what they had before either on paper or in reality, the team's still a directionless mess...apart from two weeks from now where they'll suddenly turn into the greatest example of Total Football since the 1988 Dutch team That's why I brought up Rebrov a few posts ago: in theory he would have improved the team around him due to having a much higher ceiling than the likes of Steffen Iversen or an ageing Les Ferdinand, but the reality was that the team surrounding him actually dragged him down due to George Graham's route one tactics not playing to his strengths The idea of a player improving a team realistically doesn't stack up as anyone who has watched Argentina in the last couple of World Cups will know, because the entire team - a team including the likes of Dybala, Aguero and Di Maria - is set up in a way that they're hoping that Messi will pull something out of nothing so they get the result, which is not only a nonsensical way to set up a team that has various other quality players in it, but makes it look like they watch the highlights of Barca matches and think that's how Messi has always played for them when in reality he was more of an exclamation point on top of the rest of the team
Eredivisie Rando/Left Back/Prospect Watch Murdoch's Sunday Hate Comic has taken a break from trying to convince us that anything bad with the economy is obviously due to Chinese Death Flu and we should ignore the three years of it circling the drain because enough people were duped by a ****ing bus to report that we're looking at PSV U17s left back Nawaaz Landfeld As tempted as I am to say this is bollocks due to who's reporting it, the fact this comes a few days after reports of trying to sign the similarly left backed Kevin Ciubotaru after a trial indicates two things i.) We're in the market for a long-term prospect at LB, especially with Dennis Cirkin currently ruled out ii.) Thanks to aforementioned people duped by a bus, we have a very limited window to sign any U18 prospects from outside of the UK - namely if we don't sign them before the summer transfer window closes we'd have to wait for them to turn 18, giving Spanish, German, French, Dutch, Italian etc etc clubs a two year headstart And it does have to be said that we have been picking up overseas prospects before they turn 18 for a couple of years now, namely Troy Parrott, Yago Santiago and Isak Solberg
The last point is very important. But it isn't only Leeds. There is only one example of a club consistently improving its league performance as much as Spurs have during the time that ENIC has been in charge. That is Man City. And they did it by flouting the rules. Every other team has done worse. If we hadn't had ENIC/Levy then we would most likely have been like Everton, Aston Villa, or Newcastle....all of them had the same potential as us but none have come close to our actual performance. As for financial matters, I think (or at least hope) that fans misunderstand Levy's role.....he shouldn't be involved at all in player valuations...that should be the job of the manager/scouts or ideally a DoF. But it's perfectly fine for him to be involved in negotiations which are about actually buying the player at or below the valuation we have come to. It's absolute stupidity to pay more than someone or something is worth. But it is equally stupid to walk away rather than pay the right value. There is absolutely no evidence that Levy does either of these things.
We've tried waiting for people to leave before we sign their replacement and as Levy told the THST, they don't leave. Maybe it's time to sign their replacement and indicate that it's into the U23's with them if they don't go. For the last 4 transfer windows Victor Wanyama has had zero incentive to leave. We drop him from the CL squad and you don't see his heels for dust. There is usually a way, if you're prepared to think of one. The borrowing is an issue but not insurmountable. The playing side needs investment and ENIC could make the club a loan or have a rights issue or sell a percentage of their stake to an outside investor. It may not be possible but would they try if those were viable options? If we're going to have a net transfer spend below clubs with an income of hundreds of millions below us and Mourinho leaves as a result, Levy's going to need those broad shoulders because he's rightly going to be getting it from Mourinho fans and those of us who thought that he'd lost the plot when he appointed him.
What someone is worth is a mightily flexible concept. I thought that Klopp had lost his German Marbles when he paid all that money for van Dijk...and so did an awful lot of people. Barcelona thought than Coutinho was worth well over £100m. We paid £56m for Ndombele and just over £40m for Lo Celso. There's no paying what someone's worth. You pay as little as you can get away with, which is enough to sign the player from the selling club. What they'e worth comes later - when they've failed or succeeded.
I agree you can't really tell, but you can't tell if they are going to be any good either so the best strategy has to be to set a value you are happy to pay and walk away otherwise. What you mustn't do however, is apportion any blame if the value is wrong....because it will be the majority of the time, so you will miss quite a lot of good signings and sign quite a lot of dross. If you sign dross you need to take the rough with the smooth and sell on at a loss asap. A good thought experiment would be...what if we had set our valuation £10m higher. We would have signed fewer players but higher priced ones. Would we be any better on average. Not obviously.
With players you no longer want the club should simply be honest...find another club or rot in the under 23s as you will not get a squad number. That would have ridded us of Rose and Aurier and Eriksen last summer. With injured players such as Wanysma we should have offered a free or very low transfer fee so they'd get a signing on fee to make up for any cut in wages ... I think that is s kind and sensible way to deal with players who are injured and no longer able to play in the premier league. This summer the club needs to decide who it wants out an act accordingly. 1. Vorm ... do not renew contract 2. Aurier ... find a club or no squad number. 3. KWP ... sell ... cheaply or free if need be. 4. Rose...find another club or no squad number 5. Gazzanigga...sell cheaply...we need another keeper to challenge as a number one and he is not it. 6. Foyth...Jose doesn't seem to want him (not complaining just observing) ... sell cheaply if need be. 7. Sanchez ... sell ... we are stuck with Toby and personally Sanchez is way too inconsistent...if any bid close to £20m comes I would take it. 8. Davies...free transfer...he is broken but could make it as s squad player elsewhere. 9. Moura...sell but only if offered very good money...when kane and son are fit he doesn't play. If we made £30m we not only free up squad space we slso free up money from their wages. Personally I would keep 1. Dele ... close call but on balance would not sell. 2. Lamela ... decent as a sub but not as a starter 3. Dier ... looked good in defence and appears to be getting his fitness back. 4. Winks ... see Lamela In the long term I think Kane and or Son are gone next summer (2021) but can not see us selling them this summer...would rather we sell Dele than either of those two.
2. Keep, still suspect defensively (understatement) but has become a real asset going forward. Sign a new RB for competition though. 5. I'd consider offers for both keepers, we need a new number one and maybe selling both and signing two to battle it out would be good for us. 7. No way would I sell. Has shaky games but is the only semi-reliable CB we have. We paid £36m for him too, selling him for £20m would be disastrous business, especially as he has about four years left on his deal with his best years ahead. 1. Someone we could sell for a good fee. Far too inconsistent, can only play effectively in a particular position/ style and if we go 433 that position disappears. 2. Sell. Love the guy but so unreliable with fitness. We're wasting a squad position on him. 4. CG ruling makes it tough for us to sell him, whilst even if we don't finish in a European spot (which I think CG is for) we're still short on HG for Prem rulings, so we're stuck with him unfortunately. Otherwise as I'm sure everyone knows, I'd sell without fuss, especially as like Alli he could fetch a bit.
