I don't want ENIC out but our chairman must change imho. He has got EVERY major decision wrong since November 2019. 1. Making JM manager 2. Giving Alderweireld a new long term contract. 3. Giving Dier a new long term contract. 4. Threatening to furlough staff. 5. Joining the ESL. 6. Not sacking JM in February when it was obvious that he needed to go. 7. Sacking JM with no manager lined up. These aren't a matter of hindsight, they were argued by many of us at the time. JM was a moronic choice of manager...right up there with Sugar making Bloke in a coat boss. Dier and Alderweireld both spent over a year tarting themselves around other clubs and were rewarded even though they were clearly on the decline. Not sacking JM in February and getting a full time manager in has cost us any chance of a top 4 finish and of winning the cup. It will also prove to cause an issue re our summer window as the new manager has not been able to identify players he wants to keep, to sign and to sell. To my mind Levy has undone lots of his good work and needs to go.
He needs to put a DoF in charge and stick to the infrastructure stuff. Stadium, training facilities, property, non-football events, etc. That's all fine. Signings, coaches, contracts, the academy, etc. Leave it someone else.
I agree with RCL/ PNP. I’m not ENIC out but I do want significant changes and should no changes happen sooner or later then I think my mind may change. Business-wise it’s hard to fault him other than ticket prices. Football-wise it’s hard to praise him, other than getting the right calls on Jol, Harry and Poch, which some can be argued of stumbling upon anyway.
Just a reminder, a DoF is also responsible for the following * Spending months undermining Martin Jol because they wanted to work with Juande Ramos * Responding to us selling Keane, Berbatov and Defoe in the space of six months by signing Pavlyuchenko and...nope, just Pav * Replacing Gareth Bale with a grossly inflated wage bill and a replacement for Aaron Lennon, who we hadn't sold I really don't get this belief that a DoF will magically fix things when Frank Arnesen is the only DoF we've had who wasn't a complete ****ing disaster
What? That’s like saying all managers are the same so no point sacking one as the next one will be just as bad? A decent DoF will make a huge difference as it will take Levy away from footballing decisions and help the manager. The problem is Levy doesn’t have a good track record at picking DoF or managers
Pleat: decent, as his brief was to scout lower league talent (and predated Levy) Arnesen: did a good job as he worked well with Santini (amazingly) and Jol, before getting tapped up by Chelsea Comolli: a complete ****ing disaster, as he shat on Jol and then proved to be out of his depth with Ramos Baldini: a profligate psycho who embodies the phrase of how it's easy to spend money when it isn't yours Mitchell: identified Janssen and Nkoudou as players who would do something The fact that both Baldini and Mitchell came to the club off the back of sterling reputations and then did nothing to justify them - and, contrary to the reactionaries last season, most of the Monster Energy Dusseldorf first team squad were signed by either them or G Fuel Vienna when Mitchell was still at Spurs so he doesn't deserve credit for that - is the reason to not expect miracles, yet for some reason people do The fact is Comolli went rogue on Jol and should have been sacked for it, Baldini lost his head as soon as he had some money and pissed it away to unbalance the squad, and Mitchell was missing out on some real talent to sign dross (IIRC, missing out on Ousmane Dembele and Alexander Isak and trying to make up for it with Nkoudou was cited as a reason for his sacking by at least one source, which I believe was either Matt Law or James Olley) is the reason I don't assume a DoF will be the instant fix people think it will be, especially if the DoF wants to go one direction and the manager another
You can say the same about managers though. Just because one is bad doesn’t mean the next one will be. My biggest worry is that Levy will again choose a dud DoF as well as manager.
The point with a DoF is they have to mesh with the manager, because if they do good things will happen - but if they don't it goes south quicker than a Concorde flight to Johannesberg Say we bring in (to get a couple of names on the board) Rangnick and Potter and the two mesh, so when Potter says he wants X, Y and Z that is who Rangnick goes out and identifies (or we just nick Bissouma and White from Brighton, since if Potter signs they'll be linked all summer long so we may as well get that out of the way already...) then it works as the two are in sync, and after that it's basically just a case of sticking to the brief about transfer fees and wages What we don't want is either what happened with Jol and Comolli where Jol identified a target and Comolli played silly buggers (for example saying he wanted a new left winger, only to get Taarabt who was at least two seasons away from being ready to go into our first team) or outright ignore him (as happened with Jol having to go over Comolli's head to ask Levy directly to sign off on Berbatov as Comolli wouldn't - again, why he wasn't fired at this point is a question for the ages), nor do we want what happened with Baldini where he decided to replace Bale with five new midfielders in spite us not moving on any midfielders that summer which also saw high earners like Soldado, Lamela and Paulinho added to our wage bill And there's another reason I'm wary: plenty of people have been talking up Luis Campos as a DoF who could do good things, and yet there is one massive question mark against Campos namely why Bielsa quit Lille within 48 hours of joining them citing their transfer policy, which is as direct a shot across Campos' bow as you can get without naming him outright
The criticism of Enic was often that they only bought players from sale proceeds - hence the club had a low net spend for so long. When the purse strings were released a bit, the recruitment was poor. The team/squad is still quite decent but the tactics were wrong under Mourinho and a loss of motivation followed. The relatively poor results which followed have caused the best player to question his commitment to the club - and it’s possible that could have a domino effect. The resolution to this would be to appoint a feel good manager who is given licence to shape the team/squad as he sees fit rather than make do with what he’s got. The next manager should be Nuno.....or Eddie Howe. Or Potter. SAF is still as bright as a button.
The main problem with this is, it's completely wrong. Bielsa quit Lazio after 2 days, not Lille; Luis Campos has never worked for Lazio, let alone when Bielsa had a city break there; They did briefly work 'together' at Lille, where Bielsa was sacked for failing to record a win in 9 straight games and acting like a dickhead.
I told you that pickled onion was bad One thing that's for sure, though, Bielsa and Campos did not get on with one another, which is pretty obvious considering the fact that Campos publicly slagged off Bielsa after he was sacked, which had a slight undercurrent of dumping the buck on player recruitment onto the guy who'd just been booted out the door It's probably worth asking if what happened there was similar to the whole Comolli/Jol fiasco, considering that as soon as it looked like Bielsa was for the chop he installed a new coaching setup (the same coaching setup we had until last month, coincidentally) who were already in place when Galtier was offered the job That sort of cloak and dagger stuff is the worst advertisement for a DoF, because there's a major difference between optimising how a team is run and deciding how a team should be run regardless of happens to be running it at the time
The problem is not the presence of a Director of Football at Tottenham, The problem's that they end up doing Levy's bidding, very often in complete opposition to what the manager reasonably requests. Once Levy stops meddling, it might just work, as it does successfully at numerous other clubs where Levy isn't ****ing things up.
Bielsa's a control freak who wants to run absolutely everything, though. It's working out well for him at Leeds and he's done a very good job there, but he requires very specific circumstances or he storms off. He's never managed a club longer than this and he's 65.
Comolli wasn't doing Levy's bidding, if anything Levy ended up doing Comolli's bidding by undermining Jol and tapping-up Ramos because Comolli was adamant he was the man to take us forward as if Jol wasn't there The problem we have with a DoF is that there's a scapegoat for any agenda or Narrative that people want to concoct, be it Judas having the ****ing nerve to try and blame David Pleat for him letting his contract run down to the current fatwa the reactionaries took out against Steve Hitchen because he said the January transfer window is a pain in the backside (which it is, countless managers from countless clubs have said it is, but when Hitchen says it...oooohhhhhhhhhhh), while the Grauniad kept pushing the theory that Arnesen was only hired to get a buffer zone between the manager and the board It's hardly unique to us, either, after all remember the acres of column inches bemoaning Saltypool's transfer committee a few years back?
Here's the thing about that: there's usually one post on r/coys per week claiming that the board have pocketed the cash from sales even though it can be demonstrably proven that they're reinvesting the money into the squad. In other words, we've reached the point where the reactionaries are making up any **** they want and chucking it out there into the world But much like the UK's Eurovision entry, they completely miss any semblance of a point, and this is also where those bemoaning Leicester investing into their squad after sales also miss the point: that involves selling somebody for the sort of money that can bankroll a full rebuild of the team, preferably somebody who isn't a vital component of the team (i.e. Coutinho) or can be replaced easily due to cashing in on English Tax (i.e. Maguire) So, let's take a look at our squad in the summer of 2018 (since that transfer window continues to be a point of contention) and ask the simple question: who wasn't an important component of our team who could have been sold for big money, or somebody who could have been a useful sale due to English Tax? And that's the problem Let's start with the obvious one, namely the English Tax - due to our HG balance being so abysmal nobody was that expendable, although frankly we should have jettisoned Danny Rose that summer due to him taking the piss the previous summer which would've probably netted us £25-30m easily, although that would have had to go to buying a HG player elsewhere to balance out the squad (i.e. bringing in Sessegnon a season earlier) On the other hand, who were the non-essential players in our squad we could move on? And this is where things get complicated, as we were expecting somebody to come in with a bid for Toby yet none materialised, Dembele was expected to head to China in the summer but missed the window due to injury, and we weren't even getting bids for deadwood like Janssen or Nkoudou. On the other hand it has been reported that a hefty bid for Eriksen was made that summer but we refused it, but the obvious point there is Eriksen was a key component in the team so isn't comparable to Coutinho and, given the importance of his role, the majority of the fee we did make would have likely gone straight back out on his direct replacement In comparison, this summer we can actually do that, as both Ndombele and Sanchez are looking like big ticket items who we can afford to let go, the former because he's simply not the controlling midfielder we need and is about as fit as a northern comedian from the 1970s while the latter has plummeted down the pecking order of a defence that includes Eric Dier, and a conservative estimate would see us make a minimum of £50m for the pair of them in this depressed market even before considering moving on any deadwood or people who decide to have a chat with Gary Neville at a really bloody inconvenient time of the season
Comolli was the one pushing for Ramos, even though we happened to have a manager in place at the time Also, the fact that Jol was brought in at Arnesen's request, albeit in a roundabout way, that's two examples of Levy doing a DoF's bidding and not the version of events you're suggesting is always the case
Comolli had his faults, none more than shafting Jol but from a signings perspective he done a lot right. Had some flops as everyone does but some of our best players in the Prem era were signed by Comolli (or signed during his tenure as DoF). Arnesen probably signed more flops than successes but he had an impact in the way we went about transfers and for many years after his departure that served us well. Baldini was a disaster and only Eriksen proved truly successful. Hitchen... Just a big fat LOL.
4. Joe Lewis effectively wipes out the new WHL debt from his own personal wealth (how many times do I have to say it ?? ) .
