The model you prefer wouldn't lead to trophies in England though due to the 4 clubs with so much more money to throw about. In Germany it is Bayern Munchen and the seven dwarfs so if Bayern fail anyone else can win. In England you need 4 clubs to fail to have a sniff and even then there are other clubs who can sneak in front of us. The only route to success is more money.
Firstly, Liverpool are hardly rolling in it and won. Secondly, there is already a precedent of that happening when Leicester won so it can happen. Thirdly, you say it needs 4 clubs to fail, i say it means theres more opportunity as these 4 clubs help take points off each other rather than having 1 big club steam rolling everyone else. Lastly, Atletico in Spain also follow their own philosophy and mantra aren't all about the big money mantra and they have won a few.
Liverpool have the second highest revenue in England! Atletico are easily the third biggest club in Spain
ive always maintained that since we are not going to do a Chelsea or City we should be doing an Ajax or Dortmund. Stop wasting money on the Jack Clarke’s and pump it all into recruiting the best scouts available. However it quickly dawns on me that Levy knows **** all about football so that’s that.
Leicester won in a season where Chelsea, Liverpool and Man Utd failed to finish in the top four while The Sheikh Mansour Team barely scraped into fourth, which proves the point as all four of them bottled that season
Realistically the DoF needs to be recruiting for the scouting system - and that also highlights the failure of our previous DoFs as Comolli didn't in his three years at the club (yet slagged off our scout network in interviews), Baldini wasn't with us long enough, and Paul Mitchell apparently bought Football Manager every season
Revenue is all well and good and the stadium means we'll be closer than we have been, but some clubs invest irrespective of revenue. Liverpool and us compete at a disadvantage to the Chelseas and Man City's of the world. So I would say Liverpools model is the way to go. Also Atletico may be third but it is an awfully long way (or has been anyway) behind the top 2. Again, it is a model we need to follow. Although we get outspent by a few clubs, we are doing OK financially and can at least give it a go.
Paratici seems more hands on…has pride in his work it seems. I hope he does something about our scouts.
The first steps have been taken...and those have been to get in some specialist managers. Until last summer, just about everything ended up on Levy's desk. Given the massive expansion in the club's activities, that's not a smart way to run a business generating £400m of income. This year has seen the appointment of Todd Kline (Chief Commercial Officer), Fabio Paratici (Director of Football) and Chris Perkins (Head of Emerging Talent). These 3 blokes will carry out functions that were not being carried out effectively before and possibly not at all in some instances. Paratici can spend whole days doing groundwork for transfers, agreeing strategies with the coach and hopefully, not then have to suffer major interference from Levy on making signings. Since we recruited Kline, the club have a shirt sleeve sponsor and a training kit sponsor. I've seen at least a couple of other minor ones as well. Hopefully, he can land the elusive stadium sponsor, which must surely be helped by us becoming less **** on the pitch. The club has outgrown its old management structure. That is testament to what Levy did over 20 years. Continuing to do it that way, will wreck that work. He and we have to evolve, because since we moved to Wembley and massively expanded, we've ****ed up pretty much every big decision that we've made.
Ajax and Dortmund would almost certainly do worse than us in England. Scouts are an irrelevance these days. It's all about data at the level below the top 10 clubs and all about money in the top 10. That's because everyone has access to full video coverage of every match that the top 10,000 players in the world play as well as detailed data about individual performance. Some person watching a few of those matches in person can't possibly have an edge. Everyone knows who the best performing players are and they join the clubs with the most money. More than half the time the player doesn't perform as expected and looks like a waste of money but the richer clubs just sell at a loss and buy someone else. For the players outside the top 200 or so the differences in performance are very small so there is a chance that data analysis can give you an edge. I think that is how Brentford have improved but it won't get them much higher. Levy understands this only too well which is why he is focused on increasing revenue.
despite all that, Ajax and Dortmund still attract and nurture young talents that become the Worlds best at some stage or another…more regularly than every other club it seems. So even if it does work like you claim…them 2 clubs seem to defy your theory on a consistent basis. Whatever they do…I believe we should emulate. In the PL we have Lesta who are probably the closest to them 2 clubs when it comes to striking early with recruiting the right talent for a good price. So I don’t believe it’s a closed shop like you are suggesting.
we didn't until Klopp started getting us to finals and competing at top of the table .for example in the accounts ending 31.5.2018 Turnover £455m (3rd highest in the league, up from £364m) my guess the previous year we were 4th or 5th considering the nigh on £100m jump in the year .
Which ex Ajax players would get into a world squad? I can't think of any. Dortmund possibly Lewandowski and Hummels but not even sure about them.
It’s a chicken and egg situation. While one-offs like the Leicester title-winning team will always occasionally happen, to consistently challenge for the biggest trophies (League and CL) you need, obviously, a squad containing some of the best players. If you’re not at the least in the CL consistently then your team and/or manager will get dismantled and/or disrupted steadily over time, and even then you’ll need to at least win a domestic cup every few years to keep the players a bit happy. Leicester have been smart about what they did after winning the title, with some key members of that team being sold on for good money, and investment in the scouting team meaning they have had an edge in recruitment in recent years. But like PS says, when everyone has the same data, keeping that edge is really difficult. They’re also currently 11th in the PL table and 3rd in their EL group behind Napoli and Legia Warsaw. The magic isn’t entirely consistent, clearly. Ultimately money talks. If you have a player or players at the top of their game and they don’t win anything for a few years, these days it’s extremely unlikely that they won’t want to move on. You either have to throw a load of money at them, which won’t always work, or be able to improve the team around them more than the other teams in your competitions are. Historically there are several clubs in the PL who have years of consistent CL revenue behind them and/or historically large stadia and fanbases that have allowed them to dominate the league. The Big 4 were a cartel for years, then we broke in for a bit, and City became a permanent fixture after the takeover. It went from a 4 to a 6 and then as ourselves and Arsenal have fallen off, it’s probably a 4 again. But keeping top players at a club like Spurs or Leicester is very very difficult if you’re not winning trophies (realistically domestic cups), and even then it’s not guaranteed. Permanently breaking into the cartel under this Spurs ownership requires investment in money-making infrastructure that can be somewhat independent of what happens on the pitch (mainly stadium, and other related revenue sources), raising the profile of the club at home and abroad to make the most of this infrastructure, and ultimately success on the pitch. Levy has largely succeeded with everything off pitch, which is frustrating for fans but to his credit. The only other option would be a takeover by extremely wealthy owners. I don’t see the Ajax and Dortmund comparisons as valid for the PL. Ajax are the biggest club in the Netherlands and yes, they do an outstanding job at developing players, but domestic honours are way easier for them to win than in England and they are known internationally as a selling club. Dortmund haven’t won the league for 10 years since their Klopp era and everyone knows they are a selling club to Bayern and other European teams. But there’s too great a concentration of money and quality in the PL to replicate their approaches in England. Ultimately they’re not end destinations for players, which is what Levy is trying to make us. Doing that organically without being one of the big clubs for whom the PL era came along at exactly the right time, or having big money owners come in during the PL era such as Chelsea, City and now Newcastle, is a mammoth task.
It depends on your usage of World Squad. Is that one team and x amount of subs where you select the best players in each position? If so, with the exception of Messi and Ronaldo, it'd be far too subjective because if you asked say 100 people to name the world's best they'd all almost certainly have many differences. There'll be bias and just simply differing opinions. How do you say who's better out of Lewandowski, Aguero, Benzema and even Kane? How could you pick two CBs from the likes of van Dijk, Silva, Ramos, Dias, Chiellini, Bonnucci, de Ligt and Hummels? But if you'd define a World Squad as players who could easily be in the conversation for being amongst some of the best in the world over a period of time then both Ajax and Dortmund would certainly have ex-players, Ajax especially who've been a hotbed for talent for decades.
I meant a squad of 25 but currently I think the only ex-Ajax player in the top hundred is de Ligt. What has worked for decades can stop working at any time. I actually think most of us would agree about 75 players in the top hundred even if we wouldn't put them in the same order. In any sport where ranking is objective, the biggest differences are in the top ten with everyone getting closer and closer together as you go down the rankings. Anyone can watch the world number 1 and the world number 10 for a few matches or races and agree who is better. But the difference between the world number 200 and the world number 300 is tiny and only becomes obvious over a long period of results during which relative positions can easily change. Since three quarters of the top 200 already play for our richer competitors, most of our squad must be in the 200 to 1000 range. Yet people are sure that they know for example, that Hojbjerg is better than Winks where even if Hojbjerg is 200th and Winks 1000th, the difference in perfomance will be tiny.
