Palace have said £50m for Guehi, while Kilman has three years on his deal so would surely be around £40m Certainly better to have a stopgap in place just in case, regardless of what those with UKIP emojis in their Twitter name say
CB Watch Fabrice Hawkins isn't the bassist of a mid-90s Kula Shaker knockoff, but a football journalist claiming we have made contact with the soon-to-be-free agent Evan Ndicka...although it is worth pointing out that he seemed set to join Roma, like, two weeks ago Meanwhile, PEH has been making contact with Joachim Andersen
He makes a valid point, but ultimately 'backing' the manager is quite a subjective term. At the end of the day, if a manager doesn't feel backed, it is always going to be a struggle to put forward that particular point. Of course, it does depend on what was made clear during the interview process. If someone like Conte makes it very clear that he isn't remotely interested in young prospects or players who don't fit a specific tactical profile, and we then go and spend a total of £55m on Spence, Bissouma and Udogie, it is hard to argue that he was 'backed' even though the numbers on the spread sheet indicate that, technically, he was. So yes, quite a few "acquisitions have not turned out as we hoped", but how much of that is down to a specific manager requesting them and being sacked shortly after (Ndombele, Lo Celso, Sess, Royal all fall under this category); and how much is down to a manager requesting a specific player and being given someone else (Bergwijn, Rodon, Bissouma, Gil and Spence all fall under this category)? By this measure, the only big money signings who can be considered as fully "not turned out as we hoped" by any and all measures are Sanchez and Richarlison.
Backing the manager can't possibly be about signing the players the manager prefers because I can see no evidence that managers have an edge in selecting players to sign. We should be making it clear to managers when appointing them that their job is primarily to improve performance through their coaching skills.
I watched these last night to cleanse my palette of all the Man City, and Pep, d*&^ riding on media channels last night and to remind myself of how close we were to something truly remarkable only 4 years ago. The decline in the Spurs squad, measured up to the tweaking of the Man City squad since this era is quite telling. Notice which players were missing entirely from these matches. Dier has been a great squad player for Spurs, but was he ever really supposed to be relied on as a starting CB at the highest level? Pochettino clearly needed backing that he didn't quite receive in the aftermath of this, but there were also questionable decisions that probably fell on Pochettino also. Why no Llorente replacement for example? Why get rid of Trippier? I'd also add Aurier to the manager requested disappointment list. Ultimately Levy's error was arguably sacking Pochettino instead of trusting him with the necessary rebuild. Not much needed to change, but he deserved time to tweak, make a few mistakes maybe, finish lower in the table, but come back stronger. The decline of Deli Alli is also something that couldn't have been predicted. Seems like he had some kind of breakdown. So sad. I'm sure Pochettino was deeply effected by the CL final loss too. Managers are capable of identifying players, Rose and Walker were both Redknapp picks for example, but none of them get it right 100% of the time, plus tactics and approaches change from season to season. To assume that managers lack the passion and enthusiasm to be aware of players abilities, above and beyond the average fan, or even a director of football, is wild. Are you saying Sir Alex couldn't pick a player? Look at how Pep has been allowed to tweak, sell players and buy new ones all the way up to winning the ultimate prize, does he have all of his players entirely chosen for him? Are all of his signings perfect? Not saying we shouldn't have a DOF, but the stability of philosophy is what we have been missing. As an aside, I'm sure Pochettino is talking about Levy around the 48 min mark in this video.
You must have made that comment just to fire discussion surely? It's not that good a starter because it's clearly nonsense. You are perhaps describing a Coach and not a Manager? The only qualification for picking players is experience and that description fits most if not all PL Managers, because without it they wouldn't have a job. Yes picking players is always a chancy business but having loads of money does not qualify as a sign that you can pick a player. IMO in most cases the manager is the best person in a football club to pick a player and if he can't then you need a new manager. How can you assemble and manage a team without being able to identify the qualities of each individual? You can't.
There's also the third option: the DoF identifying the player, yet that player not working out either because the manager refused to play them out of stubbornness (as Santini did with Carrick) or because the DoF went rogue and foisted them on the manager (as happened when Comolli dumped KPB on Jol) or simply the DoF went mental with the club's money and put no thought into their signings (as Comolli did for Jol and Ramos, and Baldini did for Villas-Boas), or the DoF signed a glut of players and expected the manager to integrate all of them into the squad (which was certainly the case with the Baldini Seven), or the DoF signs a player for one manager but that manager is soon replaced (be it Paratici signing Emerson for Nuno, or Arnesen signing Edman and Atouba for Santini) That being said, there's certainly big money signings who can be pinned on the manager: Ndombele is the most obvious (and the most expensive) as Poch was adamant he could turn him into a world beater and he didn't (neither did the ubermensch, Mason, Conte, Bosz or Spaletti...) while Soldado was reportedly Villas-Boas' choice as Baldini was pitching Christian Benteke only to be overruled, similarly there's big money signings who can be pinned on the DoF either thinking they knew better (Bent and Bentley immediately springing to mind) or looking at their stats on Wikipedia instead of watching them play or looking at their ingame data (such as Paulinho)
If you look at the list of managers that have made a real difference to an English top division team over my lifetime in the sense that performance was significantly better than you would expect from their financial position you only need one hand to count them. Of those I think only one can be argued as being obviously due to having an edge in signing players and that is Clough (actually probably Taylor). If that is right then the vast majority of managers have no edge in choosing players. No-one agrees with me on this but no-one can actually give any data that disprove it. One of the things I do in all my pursuits is to challenge the status quo where I think the common sense belief is wrong. People claim all sorts of skills for managers but in the PL they last for less than 2 years on average, so why is that? I think it's because any skill they might have increases performance by less than three other factors which are more random....success in the transfer market, getting good academy players through and luck during the season. My default now is to assume that edges that can't be detected in the data don't exist or at best can't be predicted in advance. That doesn't mean that we shouldn’t try to find the best coach, hire the best players, develop the youth better etc. But it seems bonkers to me to put one person in charge of all that when the skill sets are entirely different. So we shouldn't have a manager...we should have a coach, a head of recruitment and a head of player development who work as a team.
@LockStock We signed Rose prior to Redknapp and Walker was a makeweight in the deal that brought Naughton! Not getting at you specifically but that is quite typical of the responses to my posts. To show that Redknapp has an edge in choosing players you need to look at all his signings not cherry pick. Look at the top 100 signings in the PL on transfermarkt. Ignoring this season's ones which are probably too early to tell, you would get under 40% as the success rate by my reckoning (measuring success as becoming a key member of a team challenging for top 4). Pep Guardiola's signings are generally better than that and ours are worse so it's possible Pep has a positive edge and we (mostly Pochettino as it happens) somehow have a negative one but there isn't enough data to prove that.
Yes Clough, of course, but also Mercer & Allinson (A City team to be proud of) Robson (Ipswich) Dalglish (Blackburn) Ranieri (Leicester) Sexton (Chelsea) Arthur Rowe (Spurs) Bill Nicholson (Spurs) Burkinshaw (Spurs) Pochettino (Spurs) Venables (Various) Those are the outstanding ones that spring to mind. What do you mean by edge? Better than who? The ability to pick a player and match them with a team is a defining quality required to be a manager. Without that what do you have? Enthusiasm? The other skill being man management and that will include the ability to spot attributes. I think you are confusing the random nature of football with the skills required to be a manager. Of course luck is a huge factor in the game, without that football would probably not be the global game it has become. That means Leicester could win the PL that Greece could win the Euro cup, and England could lose to an ordinary Italian team. Nobody can claim overwhelming success in transfers but it is much easier for Real Madrid and City when money is not a factor. The whole football community identifies the really top players. Signing Messi relies on your wallet rather than your judgement. Grealish for 100 million? You have to expect some success in return. I think we are all more impressed with Brighton and Brentford than we are with City. Those two clubs alone make your argument unconvincing.
In my lifetime these managers all made a massive difference long term to their teams. Clough made forest a power house until his drink addiction took over. Shankley and Paisley at Liverpool. SAF at United...made them a power house for almost a quarter of a century. Wenger at Arsenal...completely transformed the club from top to bottom. Burkinshaw and Jol at Spurs...both took us from nowhere to challenging while implementing a great style of football. Could also make a case for Pochettino too. John Lyle at West Ham won two FA Cups, got to a European Cup Final and a League Cup Final, got them promoted and to a 3rd place finish in the old top division. Bloke in a Coat... took a dead gooner team and won an fa cup, 2 league cups, 2 titles and a European trophy in a 7 year period. Then there is JM, He who must be called Pep and Klopp. That's 13 off the top of my head and only in England.
I'm not sure that we're disagreeing. I'm not saying Redknapp had a particular edge, I'm saying that he was able to spot a good player, and he didn't always get it right.* Even Fergie didn't always get it right, but he could defiantly spot a good player. Erm, I'm pretty sure the same could be said for our DOF's over the years too. Look at all of Redknapp's signings then some were good, no? So we agree that Pep has an edge? He is a manager too, no? Pep has an 'edge' partly because he has a clear system that has been fine tuned and adapted over a number of seasons, plus an abundance of riches. Spurs' most recent failings have more to do with clashes of philosophy between different managers and subsequent DOF changes that we care to admit. It's easier to just blame Levy, or blame whomever the manager is at the time when the disruption itself of all the changes, coupled with the financial restrictions of the infrastructure rebuild cost dearly. Poch was doing quite well up until the CL final, especially considering the restrictions. Even Paul Mitchell had dud players every now and then. * Ha! missed out a key word.
It's so bizarre that people pretend that Ferran Soriano plays Solitaire in his office all day instead of working as the DoF not just for The Sheikh Mansour Team but also the Sheikh Mansour's American Team and the Sheikh Mansour's Australian Team and, when he has time, is caught trying to tape up Barcelona players and coaches en masse while also running Spainair into the ground
I am not following your argument at all....if being a football manager requires some sort of skill then the ones with more of that skill will be better than most of the others and so have an edge. The skill I think is most valuable is coaching by which I mean helping players improve either individually or, more importantly, as a team. But there seems to be no way of telling in advance who possesses even that simple skill since the vast majority of coaches don't seem to make much difference in the long run. So we end up with the position that we appoint a manager on the off chance he is a good coach and then we automatically assume that he can choose players better than our recruitment department and needs to be backed by buying who he wants. It doesn't make sense.
I was asking how you were defining edge and you have just clarified it. How do you tell if anyone is good at anything? You satisfy yourself that they have the necessary qualifications and then you look for experience and what they have or have not achieved. That's why Mason has not been appointed I assume (lack of experience) So it's not quite an off chance selection it's an informed punt. So we agree to that extent but to argue that the manager will not make a difference is to fly in the face of the evidence. What does your 'recruitment department' have that the manager does not? You appear to be arguing that Levy and the board should make footballing decisions. Isn't that our problem? Isn't that why our board have decided that they need a Director of Football? In other words someone to take part in board decisions who knows something about football. The closest to a good arrangement would be a DOF working with the manager/coach to arrive at player decisions with Levy deciding if we can afford it and that is pretty much the pattern that Spurs are trying to create I think.
I hope the recruitment department have data files on almost every player in each major world league. I hope we've had a team within the club analysing that data for years. There will be a few players that the new coach has directly worked with where he can add value but he should not have an opinion on most of them. I doubt our analytics team have much of an edge either by the way but it's better to go with the data rather than the prejudices of an individual in my view.
Brighton is perhaps an example that reinforces your view however I (probably because I am old enough to have known a different time in football) would rather trust Redknapp than data. Players ability and skills (their data) can vary depending on the team they are playing in, bearing in mind football is a team game. I could see data collection being important in games like cricket or tennis and golf of course which is very much a data game but in football it very much depends on the manager's philosophy and the clubs plans. We can name any number of players who don't live up to expectations when they come from a different league or the manager changes. In these circumstances experience is vital and that's the managers stock in trade.
