Problem is that it's likely the response to signing Eze would've been "But we could've put that fee towards Expensive Player A" Which is exactly what we got with Jack Clarke
Only from a very small minority though I’d say. Spurs fans in general are usually in favour of buying HG talent to build up into potential stars. Clarke was just poorly treated by the club too, both in terms of casting him out on pointless loans and never giving him any proper chances in the first team. He’s showing now he’s got considerable talent and having a really good season with Sunderland. Good for him.
I think it works like this. A run of the mill PL player is worth about 10m per season so you can afford a transfer fee of something like 25m plus pay him 5m for five years. A top player is worth about 25m a season so you can afford a transfer fee of 65m plus pay him 12m for five years. But if you think you are buying a top player and it turns out you only got a run of the mill one, then his wages bill is more than he's worth to you or anyone else. So you don't expect to receive any transfer fee at all. It may be that if you send him out on loan and get most of his wages covered then he will play well and look more like the player you think you bought. Your only other option is to effectively pay 8m to get rid of him with no chance of benefiting if his performance improves. If you do that you have to take an immediate 60m hit against the ffp rules. So it's much better to loan rather than sell him.
Realistically, it was Leeds who dicked Clarke over by having six loanees that season even though they knew that they could only include five in matchday squads, and it was always Clarke who got overlooked given Harrison, White, Meslier and Costa were straight into the first team, and the second they loaned in Nketiah there was little chance of Clarke getting into the matchday squad (let alone the team) outside of somebody getting injured Just to twist the knife a little further, when we did arrange some more suitable loans for him he had rotten luck, first with his loan to QPR in 2020 curtailed by Lockdown after half a dozen games, then his loan to Stoke in 2021 had him getting regular minutes only to be ended by an achilles injury
But Jack Clarke was a waste of 10 million Wether that's because he didn't get picked or wasn't good enough Either way his contribution to us was zero therefore that was a waste of money That 10 mill was better spent elsewhere Our only problem is/was those spending the money don't know what they are doing so it would have been wasted one way or another anyway. I was one of the posters who was wondering why we wasted 10 mill on him. he may be a decent player but under our organisation he was useless and his fee a waste of money
Clarke was actually a good fit for Poch, given he was always looking for a pacy winger off the bench - and unlike N'Jie or Nkoudou, Clarke had the benefits of being young enough to coach up plus he was HG That being said, of the two pacy HG wingers we were linked with that summer, Dan James was probably the wiser choice as he wo7ld have cost the same but had more football under his belt
We`ve won the league twice, 1951 as well as 61. Man Utd were relegated in the 70`s also. You don`t get silverware or a place in the record books for a run of good finishes. I can think of plenty of organisations or individuals who would be excellent replacements for ENIC (whether they would want to is another matter of course), how about Amazon (Bezos), or Google, or Jim Ratcliffe etc, just to throw some names into the hat, there will be plenty of billionaires out there who could afford to buy Spurs and jump at the chance.
He was a buy-and-loan-back, so no He got a few appearances in 2020-1 in the cups/Europa League, before his loan to Stoke and the achilles tear that effectively ended his chances for us
Here's the weird thing about that: if the plan was to play 352 post-WC break, he makes a lot of sense - and isn;t alone in that, as similar can be said for Bissouma And this is what the issue is: Conte abandoned any plans to switch to 352 before the WC even kicked off after the system flarped against Man Utd (even though that mainly came as a result of Perisic playing in a completely different match to everybody else and left a yawning gap on our left flank) which meant we'd paid £90m on a pair of players who were earmarked for a system we'd abandoned within a few months of those players signing and were effectively trying to kitbash them into the existing system
It was clearly never the plan though, because playing 352 would've taken Son and/ or Kulusevski out of the XI for a vastly inferior player. Richarlison was signed to be backup to our front three, he's just been appalling at it and no better than Bergwijn and Lucas... having become our record signing in the process too.
I get that you don't like Richarlison, but he didn't make Son and Kulusevski ****, too. Our system doesn't work now. Anyone playing those wide roles plays badly. I don't think that they've all turned to crap overnight.
Where did I say he did? He's just a bang average footballer that we spunked a ton of money on, he joins a growing list in that regard too. Problem with him more so than any of our other big money flops is that probably 75% of our fanbase knew he was never gonna live up to the price tag before a ball was kicked, he's our very own Harry Maguire, just a different position.
I didn't mean to suggest that you did, just that everyone playing his roles aren't playing well. I don't think it's down to the individual players and I think Son is a great example of it. He's gone from Golden Boot winner to people wanting him dropped. Our wonky, bullshit system is ****ing over the team as a whole and those that play in it. Richarlison isn't going to do well, as nobody is going to do well. He's had injury problems too, which hasn't helped, but he hasn't had a good chance, in my opinion.
The system is absolutely stifling some players but then Son has always been a temperamental player so in the early days of the season it was hard to tell if it was system or player. Richarlison though has never even really been temperamental, he's just often been average and capable of scoring an occasional goal outside of his multiple dives. He was essentially brought in to be our primary backup to our front three, so doing well from his perspective was going to be subjective, the hope would've been he'd be able to change the game when coming onto the pitch or starting a few, something Bergwijn and Lucas often failed/ fail to do. However he hasn't, he's arguably been even worse than those two. I'm half surprised that from his perspective he even agreed to the move but then I do wonder what Paratici/ Conte/ Levy told players upon joining, because surely Spence, Danjuma, Bissouma etc wouldn't have said yes to the scenarios they've been placed in?
And on the topic of ins and outs, there's rumours going about Dier is set to sign/ will be offered a 3 year deal. Couldn't bloody make it up. "Rewarding Mediocrity" should replace "To Dare Is To Do".
It clearly was the plan, what with us experimenting with 352 before the WC break (usually when looking to regain control of midfield between the 46th-60th minute, which was often...) and the idea being that, as there was a mid-season WC, we would rotate between Kane, Son and Richarlison upfront - although, with the 352 experiment shelved before the WC, that made the rotation idea moot
Considering this summer we are surely going to lose one and likely two CBs, with Sanchez entering the final year of his contract so will likely be moved on while it's likely we let Tanganga leave as he's stagnated in the last 2-3 years (while Lenglet enters Schrodinger's Cat territory), offering Dier a new contract if that means we keep a backup option in place is not a bad idea
