Who is like FSG ?? Who is like Jim Ratcliffe (assuming the motivations are sound - he has been in the mix for buying PL clubs but Scholar and Levy at the least are supporters of the club they bought) ?? I look forward to seeing this list evolve (something else to do while I wait for the '2000m quid to buy out ENIC' fund to start filling up) ...
You are taking on no risk whatsoever. So let me restructure your question : As a supporter, if a new owner could guarantee that the club will never be at consequent financial risk, will you have them for 10 years min even it means a potential return to the football of the Sugar era *** ?? *** The Sugar era was characterised as effectively zero financial risk
Plus of course (and this is not 'sour grapes' it's a fact) so many trophies have been hoovered up by clubs that shouldn't even exist in their current form, which are effectively not competing fairly with everyone else. If they were not part of the equation then our performance (and dare I say it, our owners) would be perceived much differently. Because how can you possibly compete with clubs that don't have to work to any known business model? And consequently we look worse compared to them, which is hardly surprising. As has been said, one of the best and only things you can do is maximise your own revenue, and the obvious method is a new and bigger stadium. We've done that but clearly it's not enough. But it's the degree of 'not enough' that seems to be a problem for many. I can't help but feel many (and not the sensibly argued people here) would rather we spend more than we can afford chasing dreams, the if (when!) they don't come to fruition would leave us bankrupt. It's a bit like the Barcelona model (and Chelsea?) that seem to assume a change of fortunes in future, or probably a new and more financially rewarding competition will come along and save them for their short term thinking. I don't think we can afford to do that.
if you and I both compiled a list of a top 10 choices I bet neither would have added the Iranian billionaire who was interested apparently not long back so I don’t think it should be a stipulation upon those that are not happy with ENIC to name their replacement as if that proves something. Not hard to improve from the mediocrity that he paid 20 million for…the dark days of Alan Sugar I am oft reminded of…the point is the here and now and he’s struggling with that bit of our natural progression, much to the detriment of our club…that’s what the eyeball data tells me.
It’s not even about spending more. It’s about spending better. Look at the money Spurs have wasted on managerial appointments/sackings and on expensive players who have flopped just in the last 4 years alone. Spurs have less margin for error than the likes of City or Chelsea because they’re run with unlimited money so it’s crucial they spend better and this hasn’t happened for a long time.
Don’t be paranoid mate if someone invests that amount in us he won’t change his name to Alan Sugar and make us go bust
Agreed. And I think the fact we flew so high so fast under Poch has blinded Levy to the reality of the gravity of his missteps. To rebuild will take seasons. It’s unusual to progress as quickly as Poch did. Likely caused by a combination of doing a lot of things right simultaneously, Kane coming through at exactly the right time, and a healthy dollop of luck. Success in football is about long term strategy and execution, and significantly about luck and timing.
The point is that people can invest massive amounts of money and piss it up the wall in double quick time, hence Twitter is worth less than half of what Exlax paid for it six months ago Look at the two Manc clubs for another example: once has owners that dumped a ****ton of debt onto the club to force the sale and have treated the club as their own ATM to the tune of £1.1bn ever since, while the other needed two sportswashing billionaires before turning the tide as the first one thought Mark Hughes was an elite coach and basically made them a more expensive mid-2000s Newcastle
5 years Poch was here… we weren’t in league 1 when he took over. progression indeed but not to the extent that we should use it as a reason to exonerate the owner of the club for taking his eye off the ball big time. If anything it shows that he got lazy and took progress for granted due to his lack of knowledge of the game which is another red flag according to the eyeball test. Poch also tried to help Levy out by hinting in what direction we must go ‘new house, old furniture’ Klopp smashed it in 5 years because he got the right things at the right time Levy is a clown and he’s turned THFC into a circus…you have to wonder how many contracts with non footballing entities he would fail to negotiate if he used the same slack attitude he runs THFC with.
Tell your mate Levy to invest in the team and he can make lots of money win leagues and Champions leagues and the financial windfalls will overshadow the income of skydiving and joyriding at the stadium There’s an idea
We do invest in the team The issue is the team-adjacent part has been a mess for a good few years now, be it the failure to integrate academy players into the first team and routinely losing top prospects for next to nothing (or even nothing), or how we have completely lost our way in finding low cost/high ceiling players who can grow from an untapped youngster we sign for £5-10m to somebody who inevitably gets tapped-up for £50m+ and instead are paying £40m+ for players who we're going to be taking one cold bath after another on if and when we sell them It's that second part which is what is causing our squad to stagnate, because instead of taking a punt on players when they can be bought for reasonable fees we always seem to ditcher and watch their values skyrocket so they're less attainable as a result, with Kvicha Kvaratskhelia and Kim Min-jae being the most obvious recent example given Napoli paid roughly as much for the two of them that we paid for Emerson, while on the other side of the coin Ndombele, Sanchez, Lo Celso and Richarlison cost us around £200m for the four and, if we're lucky, we might get 1/3 of that back if we sell the first three this summer
A bit off topic, but surely we are worth more than that? Chelsea was bought for 2.5 billion and they don't even own their stadium (sort of)!
They ostensibly would have been valued as more given their PL/.CL successes since 2013-14 (with the belief they could continue in a similar vein) .
They probably would've sold for a higher amount if Uncle Roman wasn't funding the club through a chain of patsies a motivated seller
Lesta’s owners purchased the club, bought them up the league and cracked the code in 10 years FSG purchased Pool…re structured the club…got Klopp…backed him and won the job lot in 10 years 23 years and folk still making excuses for ENIC trophy shy owners and fanbase proper Levy generation The bastard sons of Daniel Levy are ruining the club because they suffer from Stockholm syndrome
We weren’t in League 1 obviously but I don’t think you can discount the difficulty of what we achieved under Poch. He and Levy deserve credit for that. With that said I think you’re right that Levy has gotten complacent and taken his eyes off the ball of what actually made us successful in the first place. With a bit of luck and some timely investment we would have gone the distance under Poch. We should be focused on replicating that strategy rather than chasing the pipe dream of being a Poundland Chelsea.
Leicester's owners broke FFP rules in the Championship, a league they're precariously close to slipping back into with various players running down their contracts FSG are currently in a similar position to us, as they need to rebuild the team and are currently stuttering - which makes it look remarkably like they were more reliant on Mane's dives and blatant fouls that went unpunished than most pundits would like to admit We're not the only team having issues with a rebuild, but the way we have gone about it has been a mess because teams like Leicester have been signing the players we should've been looking at 4-6 years ago, for example we were strongly linked with Ricardo Pereira when Kyle Walker was tapped up and then went and signed the quote-unquote finished article Serge Aurier, which had the knock-on effects of pissing off Kieran Trippier as he was expecting to be the starting RB after Walker left and shunting Kyle Walker-Peters further down the pecking order - or to put it another way, instead of Tripper with Pereira/KWP looking to grown into the starting role, we had two starting RBs and KWP was left to twist in the wind As I said, around 2017 we suddenly stopped looking at players to develop over a season or two into starters and instead went for players we assumed were the finished article, and so many of those signings have backfired when if we spent a fraction of the fees we laid out on a low cost/high potential player we might actually have the likes of Pereira or Tielemans or Kim Min-jae with us now
This bit especially is the harrowing part of our spending, add Sessegnon and Emerson into that too as that's another £55m or so. It's practically killing us and any manager we have. Not only are we wasting the money we have but we're unable to really bring in replacements for these until they're out the door, and getting them out is much harder than it used to be due to Premier League paying wages generally far beyond what European counterparts can offer. We need to stop spending huge money on mediocrity (Richarlison) or spending huge money on potential (Ndombele, Lo Celso, Sanchez etc) because potential is never a guarantee, no issues with punts like Clarke, Udogie or Spence who cost us drops in the ocean and have generally been our bread and butter but otherwise we need to spend on actual current ability when we're looking to really break bank.
