Queen Victoria dies<-------------------------->Spurs last title<------------------------------>now. Symmetry
On this day in1974 Spurs signed Alfie Conn and coincidently the sale of hair care products raised by 500% in the N17 post code
Its only 60 years compared to some thats nothing!!! Only 12 teams have won it in the preceding years, 4 of those just once. Yes its far too long but I would guess that it will be a few more yet and thats if we ever win it again.
I am sure most of us had seen it - I did wonder which of the non spurs fans here would be first to post it, so well done Luke!
It would be a lot more likely without the two artificial and financially doped teams who usually finish above us. It's so accepted now that if you make a financial criticism of those two teams that you're the one accused of being a bad loser or sour grapes, rather than them being accused of shouldn't exist in their current form. Oh and you are supposed to sell your best players to them ("to match their ambition" or "win trophies") so it may continue forever.
Funny how the Skyte pundits say the ESL shouldn't happen as it will make football uncompetitive, yet every team in the Premier League is expected to sell their best players to the Manc clubs at a moment's notice
Weirdly, Spurs have come closer to winning recently with these two existing than before they were around.
That's the weird thing about how football works Between the late 90s and mid-to-late 2000s the only way for a club to even break into the Champions League places was for one of Man Utd or Arsenal, or later Man Utd/Arsenal/Liverpool/Chelsea, to have a bad season which is how Leeds and Everton managed their top four finishes - but now that there's more teams gunning for those four places, because at the very least The Sheikh Mansour Team buying their way onto the table makes it five teams for four places, that means it's possible for more than one team to have a poor season due to all of them nicking points off each other which would allow Spurs or Leicester to sneak in Similar happens in Serie A as, on paper, the top four would be Juve, Inter, Milan and Napoli - but with those teams nicking points off each other (and, it has to be said, some basketcasery from Milan) that allows Atalanta, Roma and Lazio to sneak in
I think people are talking about sneaking into the top 4. Shame that's the most we can hope for under the current circumstances. And as long as only a couple of teams are likely to win it (even if they don't every year) they will still attract the best players away from other teams for the trophies but also they can afford to pay wages that other teams can't sustain. And lets be honest in any real business, those clubs can't sustain those wages either, they just get them subsidised by non-economic means. Almost worse than that they collect players that hardly get a game, which is effectively wasting great talent that would be playing every week in most other teams, but instead of "waste" it's called by pundits (who of course don't want to address the real problems) "rotation". A good example is Foden. He could have been a regular in almost all PL teams two years ago but instead he rarely got a game for Citeh. Now he appears more regularly and the pundits are falling over themselves to applaud Fraudiola's "management" of his career, whilst you could just as easily interpret it as holding him back for two years. It's not as if Sancho needed those extra two years in Citeh's reserves did he?
That's the thing, though, either a team needs to have a once in a lifetime run of form that allows them to bulldoze through, as Monaco and Lille have had in Ligue 1 in recent years or Blackburn's successful bid to buy the Premier League, or a hell of a lot of teams to have bad seasons which sums up Atletico's latest La Liga win or the entire top four in the 2015-16 Premier League Obviously getting consistent results on the board go a certain distance, but when a team who should be pissing the league are pissing their pants that does leave the door open
Maybe they could have loaned him out to a mid table PL side and he would have played more games, but just by training with the likes of David Silva and Aguero and being around Pep everyday he arguably learnt more than he would have by playing more games at a lesser club. Development wise I’d say Sancho is no further ahead than Foden even if he’s played more games
Do you really think that if Foden had spent 2 years in lets say Burnley, Newcastles or even Everton or our midfield, that his development would have been as good as it has been at City, I just don't see it, it may also be better for the longevity of his career that he has been sparingly before being unleashed as fully fledged City player. Sancho rocked the boat and wanted out, he was lucky enough to go to Dortmund who are very good with young players, we will never know if he might have been better if he had stayed at City, but judging by Foden he is unlikely to be have been a lot worse. He may also have not had the same opportunites if he had joined a premier league club.
I am not claiming Sancho is better for leaving City earlier, just that it does not seem to have held back his development. And yes I do think Foden would have been just as good now with a couple of years experience of playing in the PL - which I think is better than simply training with some top players. A few players have escaped the stockpiling at Chelski too, but I wonder if being on perpetual loan has ruined some of them?
Considering the amount of players we've seen slip through our fingers because of their lack of playing time (starting with Madueke, Edwards, Kirby, Azzaoui, Binks and apparently Thorpe) in spite having Kane, Son, Dembele, Vertonghen etc in training alongside them, it's almost as if something else is keeping Foden at The Sheikh Mansour Team to force a breakthrough Hmm, I wonder what that could be...?
