Hoping Levy has learnt his lesson from Mourinho that it’s not wise to go for managers that he appreciated nearly a decade ago
Sky report Spurs fans' reaction to the news of the impending appointment of Roberto Martinez... please log in to view this image
All the clubs you mention apart from Man City have declined in performance since Levy took over at Spurs. Spurs have massively improved. I don't see how that is consistent with Levy being **** at football matters. According to you we have a Chairman who appoints bad managers, buys bad players and spends too little. Yet our average league finish over the last few years is 4th. Exactly the same as Liverpool's, Man Utd's, and Chelsea's and better than Arsenal's, all of whom had more income than us over that period.
Every time I make a comment about long term success, someone comes back with an example of a club who has done better than us for a couple of years. Net spend isn't even a good measure since you it goes down if you sell players for above their actual value. Liverpool sold Coutinho for a fortune and bought really well with the money. Time will tell if that apparent edge lasts.
Doesn't mean that it isn't one though. The most common mistake in every walk of life is to pay too much attention to short term fluctuations and not enough to long term trends. For example the random element in league points is around 5 to 10 per season which would usually be the difference between top 4 and eighth or ninth. Yet managers are sacked for the difference.
If you can't or won't see it, I guess you never will...and I will fight to support your right to be as wrong as you like, Daniel.
The Pathetic report/claim/whatever that we've whittled the list down to two: Erik ten Hag and Ralf Rangnick On a more reputable level, Alasdair Gold has spoken about reaching an agreement with our target's club, which would rule out Martinez (which, you know, I posted 2-3 pages ago before a lot of bleating about Martinez...) due to him being free to talk to clubs as he's leaving the Belgium job after the Euros Anyway, back to the aimless and tedious kvetching...
Yes I know. But i know of no other way of making glory more likely than making the team better. I don't think that the Leicester/Liverpool outcome of being mostly worse than us but occasionally much better can be had by design. I would be surprised if either continued to come above us in the next decade.
I've often been accused of being Levy's brother, although not so much from 2015 onwards. His actions do suggest that he thinks about the game the same way as I do though. So I suspect we would make similar mistakes.
I actually like the Brentford system but I am not sure it works at our level. Brentford are essentially fishing in the pool of players who are between 200 and 500 best in their position. The difference between the 200th and 500th will hardly be discernible to the naked eye but might be obvious by some clever measure. What we need to do is to find young players who are around 100th best who are going to make top twenty or above. One of the reasons I bang on about randomness is that I can't see a viable method to do that. The alternative is to have enough money to buy someone who is already top 20 but that requires us to spend 50m per player which we can't afford.
It does because we more or less used a similar system from about 2004-2015 but just at a higher level. Leicester now have a similar approach too and have greatly benefited from it. Clubs like Dortmund, Ajax, Salzburg etc have similar models. I think Lille does too whilst Monchi at Sevilla has done very well for them in the transfer market either side of his short Roma stint. Since 2016 though we've seemingly lost our identity/ model and just targetted many randoms which haven't really fit either the club's philosophy or the manager's style and that's resulted in disjointed squads with many players who just aren't good enough, especially once the pre-2016 signings left or faded.
The problem is that even in their periods of relative decline, the usual suspects have at least been periodically winning silverware elsewhere even iwhen they have not been league title contenders (which placates the supporters to varying degrees) .
He's not in the real world mate, Liverpool have regressed to the stage where they won the CL and PL in consecutive seasons but you have progressed because you have finished above them occasionally in the league in the last few years.
The point with all those models is they are all bankrolled by selling one player for absurd fees and signing 3-4 to fill out the squad with the proceeds Leicester wouldn't have half their first team without the fees for Maguire, Kante and Chilwell Dortmund wouldn't have a large chunk of their first team without the fees for Dembele, Pulisic and Mkhitaryan Ajax wouldn't have a chunk of their first team without the fees for de Jong, Sanchez and de Ligt And this is where we went wrong, not accepting the big money that was reportedly on the table for Rose or Dier when it was (reportedly...) offered in and refreshing the squad with it, so instead Rose is leaving for £0.00 this summer even though he should have been jettisoned three years ago while Dier's value has plummeted in the last couple of years to the point the best that can be said is we'll likely make 3-4 times what we paid for him
Total BS. The teams you mention do not sell players for absurd fees, the sell them for the going rate for players of their calibre. Where they excel is replacing those players with equivalent or better at much cheaper cost.
I think the next manager will either be Ten Hag or Potter. Can’t see Poch or Martinez happening and tbh I would rather have Potter or Ten Hag than either of those 2 right now as don’t fancy Poch returning and Martinez is just a big no no for me (it’s not 2014 is it) Ten Hag first choice out of those 4 for me.
Kante, Drinkwater and Mahrez going rate for good players (at the time). Maguire was absurd money though. But to get Soyuncu and Fofana was very good business
