I don’t think I’ve seen anything specific about fees? Just that the deals are ‘difficult’ which could mean anything. Maybe the clubs don’t want to sell before they get replacements? My main gripe is that we appear to have done nothing in the way of exploring other options. The guy from Blackburn was for the 21s. I can’t believe the club don’t have other options they should be lining up to put pressure on Wolfsburg and Leverkusen.
Ballpark figures from reports seem to be £30m-£35m for van de Ven and £50m for Tapsoba. Circa £85m to strengthen the weakest area of our squad seems very moderate in this market for a club like us.
Oh I know the ballparks. I just meant that I don’t think anyone’s come out and specifically said the fees are what the problem is. Fab has tweeted that Tapsoba is seen as the expensive option but that wording is ambiguous and probably meant to drive engagement as much as it is to inform.
Reports have said things such as “difficult” or nowhere close to being agreed which would imply we’re acting as though the fees are problematic, as otherwise I can’t see why they wouldn’t already be Spurs players. Personal terms definitely won’t be issues with either player.
Tapsoba I understand to an extent. 50m is a lot even in today’s market. If we are as keen on VdV as we are said to be though I can’t understand why we haven’t stumped up. This is a big week to come, in both directions when it comes to recruitment.
The closest we've come to talking about a fee for either of them is Simon Rolfes saying they won’t sell Tapsoba while also saying (in the same interview...) they won’t listen to any bid lower than €50m Everything else is spitballing by journalists and/or bloggers
Adarabioyo and Monaco are close to an agreement. He has an offer from Spurs, but prefers the French side. Monaco are yet to contact Fulham.
Agreed terms with Monaco. There was an offer from us, but he prefers Monaco Reading between the lines (which is better than Twitter's nonexistent translation can do...) Monaco were offering a spot in their first team, we were offering a squad place
I think it is fair to say Ange needed and deserved the chance to see the tools he has to work with in action, but honestly - if he couldn't see issues at CB just by watching a few highlights of us last season, he has no business being in football. In fact, he confirmed almost two weeks ago that the club was working on bringing in a CB so he is clearly in support of the idea. As the saying goes, a leopard never changes its spots. Levy is Levy. The likeliest explanation behind the delay is that we are trying to do the next piece cost effectively. Be that through shifting Kane, shifting deadwood or stalling to put pressure on the seller, all options by definition have high risk margins as they will inevitably take us dangerously close to the end of the transfer window. At that point, other risks enter the picture - risks we've seen a dozen times before: the seller says 'sorry we don't have time to replace him anymore', or another bidder comes in and swipes the target from under our nose. While entirely predictable that Levy would do this, it still does disappoint me. I'm not at all surprised, just disappointed that in the one window it is imperative we take a big hit and support the new manager come what may, we are still doing things 'the old way'. But after the way we failed to back Poch, Maureen or Conte adequately, what else did we seriously expect?
Does anybody remember that other £50m that was raised through a share issue and never drawn down, what happened to that? No doubt it is paying for Go Karting and a new NFL pitch, when it should be paying for a top class CB. So, you can see where ENIC`s priorities lie. Levy & ENIC do not give a shiete about the everyday fans, it is all about money, they tried to take us to Stratford for money, wanted to sell out to the ESL for money, they raise ticket prices in the middle of a cost of living crisis for money, they furloughed staff for money etc. They told us the stadium would be a game changer and yet we are still messing around low balling clubs for key players in the transfer market, nothing has changed apart from we waste even more money than we did before (see £20m Levy signing Djed Spence, apparently he has a poor attitude and is not fancied by Ange at all). Every manager under ENIC has been left with a short squad, Mourinho wanted Skriniar, he was given Rodon, Conte wanted Bastoni, he was given Lenglet, it will almost certainly be the same for Ange. Rant over.
Lack of European revenue will have definitely made Levy panic. It really shouldn't, as we are unbelievably strong financially and in FFP terms. But it will. He has always panicked too easily.
I ain't defending Levy but your last paragraph is very generous to Pochettino, JM and Conte IMHO. These transfers are all from 2019. Sanchez (£42m), Sessengon (£35m), Lo Celso (£45m including loan), Ndombele (£59m) and Clarke (£10m) from Pochettino. £192m on 4 of the worst signings in our history. Bergwijn (£30m), Reguilon (£28m), Rodon (£10m) and Doherty (£15m) plus Bale on loan (who he refused to play) for JM. That's £83m wasted in 18 months during covid with no crowds for almost a season and a half. He also bought Hoejberg for £17m. Bentancur and Kuluchevski (£50m total), Udogie (£15m), Spence (£15m), Bissouma (£25m), Romero (£45m) and Richarlison (£60m) plus lenglet and Porro on loan. That's well over £200m in 18 months. The only successful transfers out of that lot are Bentancur, kuluchevski and Hoejberg...and IMHO two of them were bloody awful most of last season. We've had players like Gil, sarr, Spencer and bissouma ignored and sidelined to make a point at the expense of the team.
The main issue with this is a lot of those signings are symptomatic of our recruitment structure missing pieces, which has the knock-on effect of either a scout being given an ersatz DoF role like Steve Hitchen was or a manager demanding one player and just that one player Case in point, when Paul Mitchell was giving the final once-over to prospective targets they tended to work out as Mitchell combined raw data with his eye for a player, and that's why most of the signings when he was around slotted in (barring the occasional dud or meme player like N'Jie) - but when he left we had two simultaneous issues: lacking somebody with the eye for a player outside of the data, and by that point Poch was becoming adamant he wanted a specific player instead of a player which fulfilled a specific role, which is why we were in for Ndombele and Sessegnon in the summers of 2018 and 2019 And it does seem to be there's a track record of managers demanding a specific player rather than a player for a role and it goes badly, be it Villas-Boas ignoring Baldini's suggestion of Christian Benteke and insisting on Roberto Soldado even though Soldado isn't really a player to hold up the ball which Villas-Boas' system required, the aforementioned Ndombele or nobody summer of 2018, or Conte insisting on Richarlison as a backup striker (and I'm half tempted to lump Porro into this category too) Some managers have an eye for a player, for example Harry Redknapp did (and martin Jol singled out Berbatov, going over Comolli's head to Levy to ask for him) but a lot of managers think they have an eye for a player only for it to turn out they don't, and the issue for us is that is what lumbered us with Soldado, Ndombele etc even though planet of people on here and/or Old606 could have seen an obvious issue with them being anointed as the key player they lacked the attributes to be
I agree, the recruitment strategy has been abysmal. But that isn't Ange's fault so he shouldn't suffer its consequences. 'Blank slate' should mean what it says on the tin, and it worries me how many times in the past 12 months Levy has pointed to our net spend and said in as many words: 'look, this mess is not my fault, we've spent money!'. True, we've spent money, but the proverbial stops at him. It was him who sacked our best ever PL manager having only just started to seriously back him. It was him who then handed that squad to a manager who played the opposite style of football. It was him who brought Bale back to garner favour with the fans, when our manager believed (rightly) that only winning trophies would garner real favour and so he needed more than injury-prone 32 year olds on loan to accomplish this. We went half a season without a second striker, then signed Bergwijn in January - another player not wanted or needed but bought because the hope was he would increase in value. It was him who handed a manager who has overseen the meanest defences in football history Rodon and Doherty to 'strengthen' an already crumbling back line. It was him who then sacked that manager, brought in a DOF under criminal investigation, and appointed Choice F as our new manager before it all went predictably wrong. Then he appointed perhaps the one manager on planet Earth worse than Maureen at handling young players, and instructed his DOF to sign...young players! I'd have more sympathy for Levy if the decisions surrounding the spending of money have made sense and at least looked to be cohesively in line with the nature and strategy of the spending...but they simply haven't. Instead, they've contributed to the overall problem, needlessly making a difficult situation harder than it needs to be. Some of the players you mentioned perfectly illustrate this point, and whilst I personally don't think any of Lo Celso, Ndombele or Sessegnon will ever be good enough, I have a degree of sympathy for the fact that they were signed by a manager with a specific way of playing and within 4 months of signing, suddenly faced a succession of three managers who played the opposite way. The idea of playing Ndombele as a deep-lying DM or box-to-box midfielder is laughable. It is telling that Ange spoke very positively about Lo Celso recently - who knows! Maybe he will make a player out of him after all. Porro is another good example of how it is so easy to waste money if the surrounding decision-making is totally off key. Signed from a team that (at the time) played the same system as us. Now in a system that is totally foreign to him. Is it any wonder he looks completely lost at RB? Is it any wonder Spence has vanished from view? Ange would never have signed them, it's as simple as that. They're not bad players, they just don't fit the system he prefers to play. Backing the manager means backing the manager. Obviously don't spend beyond your means, but by the same token don't turn round to him in August and say 'right, this lot cost me £300m, now get the most out of them'. That is exactly what he said to Maureen, and Conte, and it didn't work. Levy is hiding behind our increased net spend but it is a fig leaf covering a litany of systemic problems that have caused it to be wasted to such an extent.
Levy’s just about ****ed everything up over the last 5 years. I’d say he’s lost the credit he had in the bank for previous years of positive work too. For many years the swing was generally favourable towards Levy and ENIC but I’d say the last 18 months it’s taken a massive change of direction and I’d imagine circa 70% of the fanbase are now anti-ENIC, and when/ if he does sell Kane this summer… you can probably add another 10-15% on top of that too because fans won’t forgive the failure to build a good enough team around arguably our greatest ever player, I definitely won’t. Said it before but Levy’s now fully epitomising the “die a hero or live long enough to be the villain” phrase and I don’t see a way back to be honest. I do hope for a sale and change of ownership nowadays but equally don’t see it happening anytime soon.
They are only systemic problems if you believe in things such as players exist who are world class as wing backs but can't play full back or winger at all. Every player we buy needs to be able to attack or defend. If Porro can't defend at all then he needs to be played as a winger. The coach's job is to get the best out of the players we have. It is Levy's job to increase the amount of money we have so we can buy better players. It's the DoFs job to spend the money as wisely as possible. The only place we actually have an edge is increasing our wealth which is mainly down to Levy. Levy's only real mistake was to sack Pochettino....everything else is a logical consequence of that. But as I've pointed out before there is no means of telling who the really good coaches are in advance. We just have to put up with the fact that we are about as good as we should expect given our financial status and not over analyse as to why we don't outperform.
