Transfer Rumours transfer thread fact and fiction

We've spent well over £300m on players since the high point of the Pochettino first eleven.
Gazzaniga
Aurier
Doherty
Sanchez
Foyth
Hobjberg
Lo Celso
Ndombele
Lucas
Sissoko
Sessegnon
Clarke
Bergwijn
Lucas
Gedson

That includes 9 of our top 11 signings.
So your whole argument fails at the first hurdle.

 

In theory Doherty

In theory...

 

And how many of those are an upgrade on the players they were brought in to replace?

Like I said, you sell a player for £50million and then only spend half that on a replacement and then people seem surprised when he’s not as good.

If Spurs want to operate like that then that’s fine but don’t also pretend that the club is aiming for titles and cups when it clearly isn’t.

 

Nearly every one cost more than the player they were aimed at replacing. How much more than 350m would you have spent and where would you have got it from?
And which of those players were clear mistakes or bargain basement?

 

15 players at a cost of 300...so £20 mill average...no big thing is it?

wanted 80 mill for Eriksen in his last year, 50 mill for Walker

he knows what a good price for a good player looks like...so he must know if you’re shopping around the 20 mark more times than not then you’re slowly but surely over time going to downgrade the quality of your team.

hey presto

It worked

 

That’s a bit out of context though because Aurier on paper was of a higher pedigree than Walker. He had won titles and cups so fitted the profile of a player the club would want. At the time, there wasn’t really any major issues from fans, it’s only hindsight now that we realise Aurier was a poor signing but the club moved for arguably the best possible player we could get after losing Walker when you list the sort of attributes and pedigree you’d want in a replacement.

 

I think you also have to take into account the inflation in the market when considering relative costs over time. No way do we get Eriksen from Ajax today for what we got him when he joined us.

Lots of Bale talk doing the rounds again today. Loan deal with Real subsidising the wages. It’s obviously a risk and if it turned out we did the deal then couldn’t afford a striker then it would be a shambles.

 

Gazzaniga > Vorm
Doherty > Aurier (who was supposed to be equal to Walker)
Sanchez > Fazio
Foyth ::: brought in to replace Dier, who moved to DM
Hobjberg > The lack of a DM last season
Lo Celso ::: brought in to replace Eriksen, ends up maybe replacing Dembele
Ndombele ::: brought in to replace Dembele, ends up maybe replacing...Winks at this rate
Lucas > Lamela, at least in terms of being injury resistant
Sissoko > Bentaleb
Sessegnon > Rose
Bergwijn > Nkoudou

Also, your point on selling a player for £50m and signing a replacement for less than that automatically means the replacement is not good is simply wrong, for example...
Spurs sold Roberto Soldado for £10m, promoted Harry Kane from the youth team
Dortmund sold Ousmane Dembele for €105M, spent €8M on Jadon Sancho
Ajax sold Frenkie de Jong for €75M, simply gave the responsibilities to Donny van der Beek

Those are three obvious examples of a team spending significantly less of the fee raised for a player, or in two of the three cases not a single penny, and the replacement was either a clear improvement or at least a player on the same level

 

Our recruitment has been poor in recent years but I wouldn’t necessarily say the amounts we’ve paid have reflected that of a tight/ bargain basement side.

And what’s worse is a number of players we’ve looked at and passed up on in recent years have gone on to be pretty decent players.

We paid £40m for Sanchez when we could’ve got Maguire for around £18m from Hull.

We passed up on Maddison both at Coventry and Norwich.

We passed up on Brooks at Sheff Utd.

We passed up on Soyuncu at Freiburg.

We paid £25m for Aurier when Ricardo went for £22m a year later despite being linked with him for about 18 months.

We ended up not paying the £20m for Grealish and spent £55m on Ndombele a year later.

So I wouldn’t say the club hasn’t shown enough ambition to improve (18/19 aside, as that was a **** show) but we’ve just basically ****ed it with the actual choices.

 

He sets the budget. The manager could have bought half as many players at twice the price. And the average is nearly 30m.
Eriksen is a player mentioned as one of our best ever and we only got 15m for him. But we ought to spend twice that on Millik apparently.
Liverpool outspent us for ten years and barely finished above us, but their last few transfer decisions have worked well so that makes them ambitious apparently.

 

They both joined clubs where they were basically guaranteed first team football, putting that ahead of the club's stature.
Maddison's supposedly knocking back Man Utd for the same reasons now.
He took Dele Alli's example of playing lots of games at a lower level and then stepping up with experience.

 

If my adding up is correct, our squad cost about 400m and Liverpool's cost around 480m. Given their turnover is still much larger than ours that doesn't look like penny pinching on our part.

 

Yeah it’s around that figure I think. We’ve certainly spent a fair amount, it’s just that with hindsight we’ve obviously spent a lot on the wrong players.

 

Di Marzio is saying we’ve made a new loan bid for Belotti that now includes an obligation (initial one was option IIRC) to buy providing conditions are met.

 

Lilywhite Rose are saying CCV is close to joining Bournemouth. Similar to the Amos/ Edwards deals it’ll include a sell on clause. So presumably a small fee again.

 

going to have to disagree with you here. Yea he won titles but i could probably win one playing any position for PSG. Theres a reason he went for so cheap (as well as disciplinary problems) and it was a gamble although a well calculated one. He seemed like a good player, physically good at a good age and a good price. Walker was sold at a really good price and this looked like a good long term bet.

In hindsight, he's been abysmal but you can see why the club made the choice at the time. I would never have put aurier higher and i don't think any spurs fan would before walker had his fall out. Likewise, not many clubs even entertained signing aurier for a relatively decent price.

 

And that's the point: you can't blame Levy for buying the wrong players, as that means saying the club needs Levy to micromanage our transfer business

 

Milk Watch

The annoying part is he's told Napoli he intends to see out the last year of his contract which ties in to the talk of us preparing a pre-contract bid worth £90k p/w with a £5m signing bonus

On the other hand, Roma's bid being accepted is a reason for us to consider pouncing

 

I would say the lack of ambition is to do more with spending AFTER theres a massive hole in the team that has shown up.

Walker to Aurier is good business. 25m profit though.

Dembele was slowly deteriorating and wanyama was on a sick bed for the best part of 2/3 years. Replaced with Winks and an limited albeit much improved sissoko. Only last year did Lo Celso and Ndombele come in and even that was supposedly at the expensive of Eriksen, your most creative midfielder of the past 5 years.

No striker last year and this year.

The only proactive buy was Sanchez as eventual heir to Verts and was a big splash of cash.

No replacement for Trips last year relying on a hope that aurier would improve. Even this year Doherty is a solid signing and great value at 12m but you are in rebuilding mode at the moment and doherty will need replacing in a few years time

 

A player from a winning pedigree is generally more desirable than one without though, look how much the word “mentality” has been used on this board for the last year or so and therefore Aurier winning titles in theory brought us that player with a winning mentality. If you’re gonna replace your first choice RB then bringing in a league winner is on paper the best sort of option you can do, certainly in terms of appeasing fans who’ll be disappointed to see their RB leave. I think on paper the club made the best possible choice but in hindsight had we known how erratic he’d be then we’d have definitely looked elsewhere.