The way forward for THFC ??
- Thread starter The RDBD
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Heights yes - but Winning no
Bill Nicholson imbued a winning culture into the club that gradually evaporated. Doubt it will return in my lifetime - but I am just depressed so don't mind me
I don't think that this is possible any more, due to the resource imbalance between clubs.
When we won the double in 60/61 we used 17 players and 3 of them only played 1 game each.
Now you have to have about 25/30 and most of them will be internationals.
Our wage bill is closer to Everton and Leicester than it is to City, Utd and Liverpool.
We're just not operating on the same financial level.
He also had two MF leaders who brought both
intelligence and steel to a Spurs side already potent
in attack. Spurs since 2009 would have achieved
much more with a Danny or Dave on the pitch,
Other that time I would have settled for a Perryman
or Mabbutt as captain (reliable but not spectacular,
led by example) .
The gap is getting smaller. In the most recent figures, Spurs’ income had surpassed Arsenal’s. The stadium, consistently qualifying and also progressing for/in the CL and the resulting commercial spin offs, have put Spurs into the top 8 wealthiest clubs. The difference is perhaps that the future income isn’t as guaranteed so it makes the board more conservative. There is a gap to the wealthiest which will only be narrowed if Spurs win major trophies on a consistent basis and the club’s profile around the world is raised.
In the meantime, appointing the right manager for the long term and having a plan for player recruitment is key. Changing the manager often messes up recruitment because different managers have different ideas.
Utd have shown how to get it badly wrong since SAF, although ten Hag might get the club back on track. It took SAF 4-6 years to get his plans in place and reaping rewards. He knew that a club with even Utd’s resources couldn’t just try and buy a team of star players. He got the youth structure back in place, had a team of scouts looking to identify talent which could be recruited and improved (didn’t always work but the likes of Vidic and Evra shows that it often did) and made one or two marquee signings per season if he could get who he wanted. Since he left, the club has backed a succession of short term appointments with big money to buy established stars and it hasn’t worked. Whatever money you have, it needs to be spent properly.
Bill Nicholson also had one of the most expensive squads in the League for most of his tenure and still only managed to win the League once. The then owners and all the subsequent ones until ENIC were happy for us to slip down the financial rankings with an inevitable outcome. @The RDBD will remind me that Scholar wasn't happy with that but his strategy for resolving it was so poor it nearly bankrupted us.
It's not up to the manager to adapt his system to a 50/50 squad, it's up to the players to adapt to the system and follow instructions.Yep, always the manager that is the issue, not the sub standard players or owners that go for cheap loan options and keep picking unsuitable managers everytime anyway.
New manager will definitely solve every issue and we definitely won’t be in the same situation in 18-24 months
plus 3 FA Cups, 2 League Cups, 1 UEFA Cup, 1 European Cup Winners Cup & 3 Charity Shields. Lots more to cheer about with Bill Nic.
That becomes an issue if the instructions are counterintuitive to how the player plays, as it is miscasting a player for the sake of making them a cog in the machine
Case in point, in a few recent matches Son has clearly been instructed to play with his back to goal and hold up the ball, which is ideal for Richarlison - but utter madness to ask Son to do as his game is about running onto balls or cutting in from wide positions
I think history tells us that you need to appoint a manager from Scotland or Yorkshire
The big money comes from
1. a large capacity stadium
2. sponsorship.
What a club receives from sponsors due to being a PL/CL
winner is quite a bit more.
3. TV broadcast revenues
We know from the PL/CL revenues, viewing figures in the USA etc,
that being a team that is ATTRACTIVE TO WATCH brings most of
this money in.
So the executive summary is :
1. have as big a stadium as possible (to establish a "baseline" revenue)
2. continually play attractive attacking football, as not only will it ensure #3,
you are much more likely to get #2 as a side-effect.
They have to be quite dour too (a Yorkshire/Scot Arry would not work) .
Tis up to the coach/manager to create a system
that is as simple as possible to describe and implement.
I wonder if Contes' "instruction manual" is a page of A4 max,
or an ISO9000 "never mind the quality (sic) , feel the thickness" tome.
Even in the declining end period of his reign (the 70s) ,
his Spurs teams were still reaching/winning cup finals
when the league performances drifted down the table.
To an extent, but I distinctly remember a very long period where the prevailing thoughts were on the lines of "this season we might just have a chance of making Europe" and by Europe I don't mean the Champion's League! No, expectations were *significantly lower*. And if I can contrast the current position with the 70s, it would be the *assumption* of higher placed finishes. But this assumption, and the inbuilt success that is it's foundation, is completely ignored. People want 'more', it's a human condition. Although a lot of people don't realise that their definition of 'more' is probably different to others. But generally speaking, most don't remember what the club used to be like, or do but don't use those memories to put today's relatively heady heights into context.
I have pondered whether there is a correlation between
the 'entitlement culture' of todays' younger supporters,
and general social adult infantile behaviour.
Not once in my Spurs supporting time have I ever thought
"It's been N years since Spurs last won the league. About time
we won one by now" etc.
As a kid, "banter" between supporters of club X and Y was
more or less in terms of what happened between X and Y
this season, and what on-pitch success they had that season
(and at a stretch, perhaps the above but for the season before) .
All that should matter is the club you support :
1. is playing decent football that you enjoy watching (more so if
you are a "paying customer" ) - the silverware is a bonus
2. was there long before you were on this earth and hopefully
will be there long after you are gone (so a plague be upon
those whose financial hubris/incompetence could ever
destroy a club) .
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A couple of weeks ago I posted a tweet from one of the Lunatic Fringe who was adamant that Levy should resign immediately for the cardinal sin of...fans of Arsenal, Chelsea and Man Utd having exactly one joke they keep posting online, and that hurts their fee-fees
Last time I checked, r/soccer being a paid-up graduate of the Babylon Bee School of Regurgitating Your One Joke is not a reason for anybody to resign
However, this does (unintentionally...) throw up a very interesting point: a couple of days ago Henry Winter posted an article to The Times' website where he managed to post the old "came third in a two-horse race" line not once but three times in the same copy, and this shines a light on the real issue: the story of the 2015-16 season has always been "Spurs failed LOL" and we have fans and journalists take the piss out of us for it, when the reality is that Man Utd, Liverpool, Chelsea, The Sheikh Mansour Team and Arsenal all failed that season and yet their conspiring to fail at the exact same time has never been the story because it's convenient for that to not be the story, partly as it helps with the whole Leicester City Fairytale™ narrative to omit the part about how that season's expected top five did so well that only two of them qualified for the Champions League, but also demonstrates that there's an endless feedback loop between journalists continuing lazy narratives and people with the imagination of the Subway customer who orders ham & cheese every day repeating those lazy narratives and so we get a cycle of needing eye drops due to the amount of eye-rolling that reading the same comment over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again generates
The standard then was both lower (because nearly all the players were from the British Isles) and more even (because there were not such big differences in income). So much more likely for teams outside the big five to win a cup.
And what's more...from 1960 to 1990 we were in the big five so should have done a lot better
If you state who the "big five" were, I suspect that
the on-pitch success of Spurs during that era
was not much better/worse than the rest of the set
(bar the Poool - who were the empire) .