The way forward

[PowerSpurs]

You’re right but that’s not a enjoyable way to support a team if you’re more focused on revenue than winning trophies and good football (how long do we have to wait for revenue to be at a decent level before we can expect trophies and good football)

I could be wrong but I don’t think there is a fan base more obsessed with finances of their club than Spurs fans

I don't think it's obsessive to notice that there is a massive correlation with how well the club does on revenue and performance on the field. The last ten years have easily been the most enjoyable of all the years I have supported Tottenham. We have played better football and done better in the league than at any other period since 1965 (which is where my earliest memories start). Even high revenue doesn't guarantee success, but the absence of it certainly guarantees failure.

I don't know how else to increase the chances of trophies and good football other than having more money to spend on better players and coaches.

 

[Dier Hard]

The trouble is that we have paid stupid money for players that have simply not worked.

£52m Ndombele
£39m Sanchez
£30m sissoko
£28m Lo Celso
£27m Bergwijn
£24m Sessegnon
£17m Janssen

£217m wasted in just 5 years.

That's without looking at their wages or the ludicrous decision to give both Dier and Alderweireld massive pay rises in December 2019.

It’s actually worse than you’ve said too, Lo Celso cost us £43m as you didn’t take into account there was a £15m loan fee prior to the purchase price.

Plus, within your timeframe, Aurier at £23m and Lucas at £25m were also signed, not forgetting the astute £11m on Nkoudou...

So yeah, just thought I’d sprinkle some more glitter to your post!

 

[remembercolinlee]

I can't see how you can be Chairman of a Football Club and be removed from all football decisions*. I also think that the only way to measure the performance of the Chairman is on the overall performance of the club. If you look at individual decisions then lots of them will be wrong. They will also look as if they are clustered but that's almost always illusory.
Levy has one major quality that very few people see. He understands that the only way to long term success is to increase the revenue of the club so that we can compete with the bigger clubs. In fact I think his aim is to become the biggest club in England. In any walk of life, it's always a huge advantage to be the biggest. You get your choice of the best people because you can usually pay more and they want to join the most famous company. I think he missed a trick early on because before FFP he could have tried to do it by throwing money at the team and hiring top managers (the City and Chelsea way), but that is much more risky than the way he has implemented. So my measure of Levy's success is revenue as I believe everything else follows from that. On that measure is he doing rather well and I think that will continue.

* If he isn't going to be involved in football decisions who is going to appoint the the person who is going to take football decisions?

Re*
The board should make that decision imo.

I have sympathy for some of your arguments re money but the very simple fact that has to be addressed is that Levy has taken us backwards with the appointment of Mourinho.

If that was a one off then so be it but he has repeatedly made terrible managerial decisions that were obviously wrong at the time.

Hoddle was a stupid decision. His lack of man management skills and willingness to throw players under the bus was clear from his days at Chelsea and particularly with England.
He made the Gascoigne meltdown public, was writing a diary to be published during the 1998 World Cup finals and his throwing Beckham to the wolves after that sending off was beyond cold.

To then sack Hoddle 4 or 5 games into a season and replace him with David Pleat for the rest of the season was stupid.

You could put these down to novice mistakes I guess but many spurs fans had issues with both of these appointments.

Santini was a poor choice but I don't think that was obvious at the time.

Jol was good but by all accounts wasn't his choice. However, the treatment Jol was beyond disgusting.
Many only remember the actual sacking but he was being undermined all the previous summer as the club was happily been seen with Ramos and his representatives and allowing / encouraging a press feeding frenzy.

Ramos was a car crash.

Redknapp was a great choice.

AVB was beyond moronic as a choice. With 10 weeks of him being sacked Chelsea went on to win the FA Cup and CL. He was also the manager that publicly unsettled Modric. Yet we reward him by making him our manager .

Sherwood was a pointless appointment to give Levy time to sort out LVG...who luckily went elsewhere leaving us with Pochettino.

Mourinho was a dangerous risk that should never have been taken.

3 good appointments out of 10 is unacceptable.

 

[Dier Hard]

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If true that that’s damning and shows as well wasting money on the wrong players that Spurs don’t spend enough anyway.

I don’t find that to be too damning to read to be honest. It shows us as the 6th highest spending team which is roughly where we should be. Just because we’ve recouped a lot I don’t see why having a low net spend is seen as a major issue, we’ve also got to take into account that we were putting funds towards a new stadium too.

Plus if net spend is something people are annoyed about as a means for saying we don’t spend enough, if you were to start a new table from roughly 2019 and project our net spend for the next 2-3 years from now, it’ll probably be terrible (as in very high). Because we haven’t been doing good business of late with departures, whilst arrivals have been terrible. So we definitely won’t be recouping healthy amounts on potential departures going forward.

Edit: The only way the net spend going forward will look healthy is if Kane or Son or sold.

 

["Thanks for that Brian"]

The club is a completely different entity to the one that ENIC bought from Sugar. The income for the year to June 2001 was £48.4m. In 2019, it was £460.7m.

The club is a major property developer, has huge sponsors, is running for an NFL franchise, staging rugby, concerts, etc. Levy needs to divest himself of hands on management and concentrate on managing his managers.

If he doesn't, the club will suffer for it...financially and in sporting terms. It's too big to be run by one man...and he should know this.

 

[The RDBD]

The club is a completely different entity to the one that ENIC bought from Sugar. The income for the year to June 2001 was £48.4m. In 2019, it was £460.7m.

The club is a major property developer, has huge sponsors, is running for an NFL franchise, staging rugby, concerts, etc. Levy needs to divest himself of hands on management and concentrate on managing his managers.

If he doesn't, the club will suffer for it...financially and in sporting terms. It's too big to be run by one man...and he should know this.

Not sure how the primary enterprise hierarchy is / should be arranged
to ensure "separation of concerns" .

There probably should be a "stadium" ltd, wholly owned by THFC
but a business of its own account.

THFC via its own activities are then effectively :

- paying a variable annual rent for use of the stadium
(minimum monthly rental, extra payments agreed on a yearly basis)

- the highest priority renter (its needs take precedence over all
other potential renters whose reqts would clash with the
THFC football season)


Similarly for the land/property assets that accrued via the new WHL build.

Levy could be a non-executive director of THFC, whereby his input into
strategy for transfer/wage dealings etc would not be dismissed offhand,
but not gospel either.

 

[Citizen Kane.]

Re*
The board should make that decision imo.

Lol. Did you see the 'board meeting' scene on the documentary? Looked like a group of people Levy bumped into at a bridge evening.

 

[PowerSpurs]

Re*
The board should make that decision imo.

I have sympathy for some of your arguments re money but the very simple fact that has to be addressed is that Levy has taken us backwards with the appointment of Mourinho.

If that was a one off then so be it but he has repeatedly made terrible managerial decisions that were obviously wrong at the time.

Hoddle was a stupid decision. His lack of man management skills and willingness to throw players under the bus was clear from his days at Chelsea and particularly with England.
He made the Gascoigne meltdown public, was writing a diary to be published during the 1998 World Cup finals and his throwing Beckham to the wolves after that sending off was beyond cold.

To then sack Hoddle 4 or 5 games into a season and replace him with David Pleat for the rest of the season was stupid.

You could put these down to novice mistakes I guess but many spurs fans had issues with both of these appointments.

Santini was a poor choice but I don't think that was obvious at the time.

Jol was good but by all accounts wasn't his choice. However, the treatment Jol was beyond disgusting.
Many only remember the actual sacking but he was being undermined all the previous summer as the club was happily been seen with Ramos and his representatives and allowing / encouraging a press feeding frenzy.

Ramos was a car crash.

Redknapp was a great choice.

AVB was beyond moronic as a choice. With 10 weeks of him being sacked Chelsea went on to win the FA Cup and CL. He was also the manager that publicly unsettled Modric. Yet we reward him by making him our manager .

Sherwood was a pointless appointment to give Levy time to sort out LVG...who luckily went elsewhere leaving us with Pochettino.

Mourinho was a dangerous risk that should never have been taken.

3 good appointments out of 10 is unacceptable.

Are you really saying that we have been held back because of poor management appointments? I think we've done pretty well on the field and I wouldn't want to speculate that we would have done better if someone else had been appointed at any point.

 

[Citizen Kane.]

The club is a completely different entity to the one that ENIC bought from Sugar. The income for the year to June 2001 was £48.4m. In 2019, it was £460.7m.

The club is a major property developer, has huge sponsors, is running for an NFL franchise, staging rugby, concerts, etc. Levy needs to divest himself of hands on management and concentrate on managing his managers.

If he doesn't, the club will suffer for it...financially and in sporting terms. It's too big to be run by one man...and he should know this.

I wrote about this a while back and still can't shake my concern about it. Why is a man with as many concerns and interests as Levy still chatting with players over a coffee and croissant? Unless he was putting on a show for the Amazon cameras, it bothered me that he seems to spend an inordinate amount of time hanging around the training facilities and cafeteria. The whole 'I'll have to talk to Daniel' and his frankly cringeworthy 'intervention' with Ndombele point to a chairman who is far too 'hands on'. And my suspicion is that this doesn't stem from his desire to be the modern every-man cosmopolitan CEO, rather from the fact that he is first and foremost a Spurs fan who grew up watching us from the terraces and probably gets a kick out managing the intricacies of his childhood club.

Can you picture a single Chelsea player short of their best and most senior players saying 'well I'll have to talk to Roman'? Or the Mansours flying in to have a sit down with Benjamin Mendy? I can't.

Levy strikes me as the type of character I'd love to have as a boss, but he is far, far too involved with crap that in all honesty he should be far, far too busy to give a damn about.

 

[humanbeingincroydon]

I wrote about this a while back and still can't shake my concern about it. Why is a man with as many concerns and interests as Levy still chatting with players over a coffee and croissant? Unless he was putting on a show for the Amazon cameras, it bothered me that he seems to spend an inordinate amount of time hanging around the training facilities and cafeteria. The whole 'I'll have to talk to Daniel' and his frankly cringeworthy 'intervention' with Ndombele point to a chairman who is far too 'hands on'. And my suspicion is that this doesn't stem from his desire to be the modern every-man cosmopolitan CEO, rather from the fact that he is first and foremost a Spurs fan who grew up watching us from the terraces and probably gets a kick out managing the intricacies of his childhood club.

Can you picture a single Chelsea player short of their best and most senior players saying 'well I'll have to talk to Roman'? Or the Mansours flying in to have a sit down with Benjamin Mendy? I can't.

Levy strikes me as the type of character I'd love to have as a boss, but he is far, far too involved with crap that in all honesty he should be far, far too busy to give a damn about.

This is the thing your argument misses: most clubs have chairmen/owners/emperors who are distant not just in terms of being above the hoy palloy, but are usually several time zones removed from the teams, so of course they don't get into the nitty gritty

What you should be asking is if the chairmen etc of Dortmund, Atletico Madrid, Lyon etc etc etc are as hands on with players, managers and coaches, and by and large they are, for example Gil at Atleti and Aulas at Lyon certainly are hands-on because they treat the clubs as clubs, not an ATM or a trinket

 

[Dier Hard]

I wrote about this a while back and still can't shake my concern about it. Why is a man with as many concerns and interests as Levy still chatting with players over a coffee and croissant? Unless he was putting on a show for the Amazon cameras, it bothered me that he seems to spend an inordinate amount of time hanging around the training facilities and cafeteria. The whole 'I'll have to talk to Daniel' and his frankly cringeworthy 'intervention' with Ndombele point to a chairman who is far too 'hands on'. And my suspicion is that this doesn't stem from his desire to be the modern every-man cosmopolitan CEO, rather from the fact that he is first and foremost a Spurs fan who grew up watching us from the terraces and probably gets a kick out managing the intricacies of his childhood club.

Can you picture a single Chelsea player short of their best and most senior players saying 'well I'll have to talk to Roman'? Or the Mansours flying in to have a sit down with Benjamin Mendy? I can't.

Levy strikes me as the type of character I'd love to have as a boss, but he is far, far too involved with crap that in all honesty he should be far, far too busy to give a damn about.

I agree in theory with what you're saying here but just to be a bit pedantic, Levy and Roman aren't in equal positions. Roman is owner, Levy is Chairman which is what Buck is at Chelsea and I believe Granovskaia is DoF so she would probably be a point of contact for players.

Likewise at City, Khaldoon is Chairman and Txixi is DoF and if you've ever seen some City YouTube vids (don't ask how I stumbled across them, I don't even know) but Txixi is the one who seems to deal with player signings and contracts so I'd imagine he'd be involved with the players in some capacity.

Levy as Chairman seemingly acts as Chairman and DoF and it's why I've been someone who's campaigned for a proper DoF at Spurs going forward, to ideally allow Levy to focus more on the business decisions and have someone who's more "proper football orientated" involved in the footballing ones. More clubs tend to be relying on DoFs nowadays and more and more are building their reputations as good talent spotters alongside helping to restructure how a club operates from a footballing perspective.

 

[KingHotspur]

Levy as Chairman seemingly acts as Chairman and DoF and it's why I've been someone who's campaigned for a proper DoF at Spurs going forward, to ideally allow Levy to focus more on the business decisions and have someone who's more "proper football orientated" involved in the footballing ones. More clubs tend to be relying on DoFs nowadays and more and more are building their reputations as good talent spotters alongside helping to restructure how a club operates from a footballing perspective.

This is what I’d like to see too.

Leave Levy to focus on the commercial side and improve revenue etc. I’m still amazed the stadium doesn’t have a sponsor, that must be a huge loss of money.

Get a DoF work with a manager to get the playing side correct.

 

[humanbeingincroydon]

Apparently nobody has mentioned this

Steve Hitchen is our DoF

 

[Dier Hard]

This is what I’d like to see too.

Leave Levy to focus on the commercial side and improve revenue etc. I’m still amazed the stadium doesn’t have a sponsor, that must be a huge loss of money.

Get a DoF work with a manager to get the playing side correct.

I think the club were trying to play it quite smart by showing off the stadium as it held numerous events, the NFL ones were a major success and it was getting loads of press. We had things like the Joshua fight, numerous concerts as well as rugby matches all left to go for it to get even more attention, so I reckon the plan was to wait for all of those to be done, the stadium becoming the best eventing arena around and then wait for the offers to come rolling in. What we didn’t take into consideration - not that anyone could have - was that a big **** off pandemic would ruin everything and so the events got cancelled and thus I’d imagine the naming rights got put on the back burner in fear of not getting the best possible deal.

 

[remembercolinlee]

Are you really saying that we have been held back because of poor management appointments? I think we've done pretty well on the field and I wouldn't want to speculate that we would have done better if someone else had been appointed at any point.

Hoddle and pleat returned us to relegation form...so they were backwards steps.

Jol took us massively forwards but Ramos took us massively backwards...we finished 10th and we're fighting relegation the next season.

Redknapp took us hugely forwards.

AVB took us backwards, particularly style wise.

Pochettino took us forwards and Mourinho has taken us backwards.

We are clearly further forwards than in 2001 but it doesn't mean that Levy is still doing a good job.

 

[Dier Hard]

Hoddle and pleat returned us to relegation form...so they were backwards steps.

Jol took us massively forwards but Ramos took us massively backwards...we finished 10th and we're fighting relegation the next season.

Redknapp took us hugely forwards.

AVB took us backwards, particularly style wise.

Pochettino took us forwards and Mourinho has taken us backwards.

We are clearly further forwards than in 2001 but it doesn't mean that Levy is still doing a good job.

In fairness to Jose I wouldn’t say he’s actually taken us backwards, Poch took us forward but then we started going backwards from early 2019 under him. Jose was hired to change that but he hasn’t and after 18 months, 9 signings, a shed load of dough in his pocket and tactics that are basically “pass to Kane” it’s just not been good enough.

 

[remembercolinlee]

In fairness to Jose I wouldn’t say he’s actually taken us backwards, Poch took us forward but then we started going backwards from early 2019 under him. Jose was hired to change that but he hasn’t and after 18 months, 9 signings, a shed load of dough in his pocket and tactics that are basically “pass to Kane” it’s just not been good enough.

I would ...

Pochettino's last full season (bloody awful from Xmas onwards)
P38 W23 D2 L13 pts 71 GF 69 GA 28
Pts per game 1.868

Jose this season (bloody awful from Xmas onwards)

P30 W14 D7 L9 pts 41 GF 51 GA 32
Pts per game 1.7

You can do the same with chances created...13-14 per game under Pochettino (his lowest figure)
Down to 10-11 per game this season.

We have already conceded more goals this season than in Pochettino's last season.

Any way I see it it shows us going downwards.
I have picked Pochettino's worst full season as any other season would be an unfair comparison.

 

[Dier Hard]

I would ...

Pochettino's last full season (bloody awful from Xmas onwards)
P38 W23 D2 L13 pts 71 GF 69 GA 28
Pts per game 1.868

Jose this season (bloody awful from Xmas onwards)

P30 W14 D7 L9 pts 41 GF 51 GA 32
Pts per game 1.7

You can do the same with chances created...13-14 per game under Pochettino (his lowest figure)
Down to 10-11 per game this season.

We have already conceded more goals this season than in Pochettino's last season.

Any way I see it it shows us going downwards.
I have picked Pochettino's worst full season as any other season would be an unfair comparison.

By doing that though you're excluding the results and PPG from Poch in 19/20.

Ultimately he was sacked by culmination of poor form that spread into two different seasons. The beginning of the end should we say for Poch began against Burnley in the 18/19 season and he was sacked as our form and results had still been poor in the 19/20 season. I don't know for sure what the PPG would've been from Burnley in that season until Watford in the following season but I can't imagine it would've looked too great.

 

[KingHotspur]

By doing that though you're excluding the results and PPG from Poch in 19/20.

Ultimately he was sacked by culmination of poor form that spread into two different seasons. The beginning of the end should we say for Poch began against Burnley in the 18/19 season and he was sacked as our form and results had still been poor in the 19/20 season. I don't know for sure what the PPG would've been from Burnley in that season until Watford in the following season but I can't imagine it would've looked too great.

Thanks for reminding me that Spurs have basically been ****e to watch for over 2 years now (barring the odd decent game here and there)

 

[Dier Hard]

Just had a rough look and please correct me if I'm wrong but I believe our PPG from Burnley to Watford was just 1.095 (21 games). That was also compounded by the Bayern thumping and Colchester embarrassment. It really was some terrible stuff from Poch over that period. The CL run papered over some massive, massive cracks.