Transfer Rumours transfer thread fact and fiction

[PowerSpurs]

Another point of view is how many other clubs in the list of the top 10-15 richest clubs in world football have made some many predicably inappropriate managerial choices.

Sacking bloke in a coat in the week before a semi final v the goons (when he had a big point to prove) was a poor decision and it did not pay off.

Hoddle was known to be a poor man manager.

Pleat was a sadly predictable outcome.
Santini was known to deliver boring football.

Jol took us forward and was an excellentappointment...treated terribly.

Ramos ... won a trophy but died in the league.

Redknapp took us forward.

AVB was a plainly stupid appointment.
Sherwood was just

Pochettino was a great appointment.

Jose was like sherwood with bells on sacking him 6 days before a cup final and putting Mason in charge was beyond moronic...and showed nothing had been learned from sacking bloke in a coat the week before an fa cup semi final 20 yrs previously.

No idea what to say about Nuno tbh.

Conte ended in the exact way predicted.

The caretaker choice was

3 flowers in a forest of of thorns is not a great place.

None of this is hindsight...the screw ups were all foreseeable.

Look at the teams who were near us in the League when ENIC took over and see what their manager appointments look like in comparison. There are very few good coaches and most of those are already at bigger clubs.

 

[PowerSpurs]

Yes, because Levy refuses to spend the money required and match what is on offer elsewhere. Spurs have the money (they waste enough of it on cheap punts the manager has no interest in) but have an owner who has been on record as thinking the transfer market is massively over inflated and who refuses to pay over inflated prices despite all our competitors doing so as the market is what it is. Levy has no problem charging over inflated ticket prices though.

Each of the clubs I mentioned has £200m more to spend than us every year except Chelsea who have had £1b of gangster loans written off.
If the ticket prices were too high the stadium wouldn't be full.
As usual you want some unknown owner to pay for success while fans don't contribute. That's a model that would only appeal to people needing to launder dodgy money. Every proper owner will expect a return on their investment and only the fans can fund that in the long term.

 

[Spurlock]

Your opening statement is simply wrong. We can only buy the players that Chelsea, Man U, Man C and Liverpool don't want.

none of them are after what we want

we have a clear run on Tapsoba and the kid at Wolfsburg so you’re statement is irrelevant in this context

our stumbling block is our owners attitude and once again you gave a reason/excuse for him

 

[PleaseNotPoll]

If the ticket prices were too high the stadium wouldn't be full.

That depends on what factors you've used to come to that conclusion.
Supply and demand aren't the only ones available or you could argue that they're too low.

 

[remembercolinlee]

Look at the teams who were near us in the League when ENIC took over and see what their manager appointments look like in comparison. There are very few good coaches and most of those are already at bigger clubs.

I do not dispute that we have done better than the clubs like Blackburn, borough, Everton, charlton and bolton who were all above us in the early 2000s. However if you look at our appointments as a whole 3 good choices and 8 terrible ones is not good by any standards.
In the past 10 years only Pochettino (out of AVB, Sherwood, Pochettino, JM, Nuno and Conte) has been a good choice.

The issue (for me) is Levy is regularly choosing inappropriate managers for spurs and has done for a long time.

 

[Spurlock]

I do not dispute that we have done better than the clubs like Blackburn, borough, Everton, charlton and bolton who were all above us in the early 2000s. However if you look at our appointments as a whole 3 good choices and 8 terrible ones is not good by any standards.
In the past 10 years only Pochettino (out of AVB, Sherwood, Pochettino, JM, Nuno and Conte) has been a good choice.

The issue (for me) is Levy is regularly choosing inappropriate managers for spurs and has done for a long time.

I don’t want to look at Bolton in the 90’s as a comparison of where we are as a club today and let’s thank our lucky stars

that’s a disingenuous position to take imo…we have moved past that era…there’s a reason those that can’t see fault in Levy hold onto that weak period of our existence

Borough, Charlton

come on man

we are Spurs

I’m not having this

There's a reason PS stuck in that era…it’s the only one in our PL history that gives his argument a position of strength

look at where we are today and we should be delivering a lot more

We are a big club or we are not

Everything says we are

Our stumbling block is the mentality of the owners and a group of the fanbase who love the ‘woe be us’ attitude whilst watching the club take the riches of a big club

 

[PleaseNotPoll]

In the past 10 years only Pochettino (out of AVB, Sherwood, Pochettino, JM, Nuno and Conte) has been a good choice.

The issue (for me) is Levy is regularly choosing inappropriate managers for spurs and has done for a long time.

I think that "inappropriate" is the key word here.
I don't believe that anyone on that list, barring Sherwood, is a bad manager.
They've all won trophies and been hailed at various clubs for their performances.

What else do they have in common?
Negative football and Chelsea, though Nuno misses out on one factor there.
Spurs fans hold no affection for either of those two things and for good reason.

They may not have been bad managers, but they were bad Spurs managers.

 

[Citizen Kane.]

Look at the teams who were near us in the League when ENIC took over and see what their manager appointments look like in comparison. There are very few good coaches and most of those are already at bigger clubs.

Most of the clubs who were regularly above us in the early days of the PL were left in our slipstream because of severe financial mismanagement that completely failed to take into account the changing nature of the modern game. Blackburn, Leeds, Villa, Bolton, Boro, Charlton all conform to this model so there is zero evidence that their managerial or player appointments were the main cause of their decline. All had unsustainably high wage bills and regularly went on splurges in the market trying to short-cut their way to success.

This area, financial management, is by a distance Levy's strongest suit. Were it not for his financial acumen, his series of poor managerial appointments and transfer strategy would have left us in utter ruin by now. But, mercifully, we've always had the fiscal strength to cope with years pissed down the drain under the likes of Ramos, AVB, Mourinho and millions down the same drain through dud signings. He is also very fortunate that three managerial appointments - two of whom were not his picks - happened to propel us upward to such extents that the impact of the poor appointments around them wasn't as severe.

 

[The Huddlefro]

I think that "inappropriate" is the key word here.
I don't believe that anyone on that list, barring Sherwood, is a bad manager.
They've all won trophies and been hailed at various clubs for their performances.

What else do they have in common?
Negative football and Chelsea, though Nuno misses out on one factor there.
Spurs fans hold no affection for either of those two things and for good reason.

They may not have been bad managers, but they were bad Spurs managers.

In hindsight we were chasing the dragon a bit. We knew this time with Kane would probably come regardless and with him and Son at their peak years we changed the model of what we want from football (apart from the bizarre Nuno experiment) to try and eke out the last bit of juice from a time under Poch when the messy decision making all came right for a few years.

The issue is that Levy doesn’t know what he’s doing in this era of the PL. He hasn’t adapted to the financial disparity between the PL and other leagues, and the associated closing of the gap between the ‘Big 6’ which we found ourselves in post Redknapp and Bale, and the rest of the league. The dynamic of buying and selling players is totally different today to what it was 5 years ago, let alone longer, and he’s really struggling to make it work. It’s not just about increasing the money available to Spurs through new revenue streams, which by and large he’s done well, but how you deal with other clubs and players.

 

[BobbyD]

On your last point, there is no way other than luck to get a successful manager* so no-one should be held to account for failing. It's a perfectly reasonable strategy to change managers often in the hope of finding one of the good ones.
The mistake I think Levy did make was to sack Pochettino who might well be one of the few managers who make a difference. We should tell over the next few seasons because Chelsea has the best squad now so should win the League at least once.
* If you doubt this try to find some PL teams who have had two outperforming managers in a row.

In what world does chelsea have the best squad.

If you make a best premier league team and a 2nd beat premier league team (i.e. backs up as subs) there are very few chelsea players that would make it in their unanimously and hardly who you could argue for in there.

If poch does anywhere near to challenging it would be a miracle.

 

[BobbyD]

No, the word "halfheartedly" does not belong in there

Poch wanted Ndombele, and we went out of our way to make that happen - in fact went way too far, given Pini Zahavi had our trousers down for the entirety of negotiations considering the fee and the wages we signed off on from Day One
Soldado is a player that Villas-Boas wanted over Baldini's suggestion of Benteke, and again we were anything but halfhearted in bringing him in because we paid big and also signed off on a huge wage
Sessegnon is another player Poch wanted, and much like Ndombele when he wasn't available in 2018 he was content to sit on his hands for a year and go back a year later, although in that case at least we had negotiation room which we would not have had in the summer of 2018

Conversely, Berbatov is an example of a manager wanting a player and that being the right call, as Martin Jol was adamant he was the player we needed while Comolli disagreed, with Jol putting his neck on the block to vouch for him

This idea of Levy supporting managers to a point is blatant goalpost-moving, given the conversation 3-5 years ago was he never backs managers at all...and when he does back them, he doesn't back them enough - yet at no point is there and definition of what "enough" is, which sounds uncannily like the wooly arguments the Grauniad made about Jeremy Corbyn

CK makes a great point about how levy has "backed" his managers. Two were truly back - poch and conte with expensive signings only they wanted. Conte leaving we can say wasnt fully on levy (although some could say thats conte and with his history of moaning it certainly was entirely predicable but usually after he wins stuff).
Poch he fully backed transfer wise but **** the bed time wise as he panicked and sacked him without giving him the chance to fully implement his new plans (like when poch first joined the first half of the season was bad results wise)

 

[Citizen Kane.]

CK makes a great point about how levy has "backed" his managers. Two were truly back - poch and conte with expensive signings only they wanted. Conte leaving we can say wasnt fully on levy (although some could say thats conte and with his history of moaning it certainly was entirely predicable but usually after he wins stuff).
Poch he fully backed transfer wise but **** the bed time wise as he panicked and sacked him without giving him the chance to fully implement his new plans (like when poch first joined the first half of the season was bad results wise)

I fully believed he panicked with Conte as well, and that Porro was a last-ditch extremely expensive roll of the dice to try to get him to commit his future to the club when it seemed almost certain he would walk.

£40m and Doherty's cancelled contract later, and it is difficult to see any other explanation for it.

And Poch wasn't 'truly' backed. He was in the early stage of his career as we rode the waves of disappointing results, as you've said. Then he was backed in the market for the first two years and in his last summer window. But the interim two years, which coincided with the new stadium build, football was very much sidelined and Poch and his team an afterthought.

Conte also wasn't backed in the strictest sense of the word, in that yes he was given signings he specifically wanted like Bentancur, Richarlison, Perisic and Porro, but he was also basically forced to agree to the likes of Spence, Sarr and Bissouma who he made explicitly clear were not 'his' choices and backed up those words by rarely playing them. So while I think Conte was being far too inflexible and unreasonable, the pattern of his tenure matches that of every other manager we've had under Levy. Loads of half baked cakes everywhere because, as Huddle has pointed out, he continually tries to have his cake and eat it which may have been possible when we were a plucky up and coming club in 2005 but isn't realistic 18 years later.

 

[Tilly'sowner]

I do not dispute that we have done better than the clubs like Blackburn, borough, Everton, charlton and bolton who were all above us in the early 2000s. However if you look at our appointments as a whole 3 good choices and 8 terrible ones is not good by any standards.
In the past 10 years only Pochettino (out of AVB, Sherwood, Pochettino, JM, Nuno and Conte) has been a good choice.

The issue (for me) is Levy is regularly choosing inappropriate managers for spurs and has done for a long time.

Hopefully lessons have been learnt and that we finally have a manager that is the right fit. We need to look forward now and not get frustrated by what has been wrong in the past. It’s the present we need to focus on and whilst I’m frustrated at the lack of any new defenders, I accept there’s a lot happening behind the scenes that we are not aware of. We always knew that a complete overhaul doesn’t happen in a single transfer window.

So yes, mistakes have been made in the past. Let’s enjoy the painful and slow process in getting behind the current manager.

 

[remembercolinlee]

Hopefully lessons have been learnt and that we finally have a manager that is the right fit. We need to look forward now and not get frustrated by what has been wrong in the past. It’s the present we need to focus on and whilst I’m frustrated at the lack of any new defenders, I accept there’s a lot happening behind the scenes that we are not aware of. We always knew that a complete overhaul doesn’t happen in a single transfer window.

So yes, mistakes have been made in the past. Let’s enjoy the painful and slow process in getting behind the current manager.

I always get behind the manager...even AVB and JM

 

[The RDBD]

...The ivory tower capitalist idea that best matches most fans' attitude is that we need do things smarter. Well of course we would like to but it is hard.

When you are a smaller fish then you do have to out-innovate
the incumbent big fish, as they have resources to waste.

Even then tis often the case that you still do not prevail
(commercial "wars of attrition" etc) when you have done so.

My industry experience has been that the big fishes
are often wasteful, and that if the small fishes had a
much lesser fraction of their resources, they could
achieve orders of magnitude greater things.

 

[PowerSpurs]

When you are a smaller fish then you do have to out-innovate
the incumbent big fish, as they have resources to waste.

Even then tis often the case that you still do not prevail
(commercial "wars of attrition" etc) when you have done so.

My industry experience has been that the big fishes
are often wasteful, and that if the small fishes had a
much lesser fraction of their resources, they could
achieve orders of magnitude greater things.

You are confusing outcomes with strategy I think. The smaller fish who don't innovate just die so don't make it into the comparison. Innovation isn't a strategy in itself but if you are in the 10% who manage to do it then you will be successful.

 

[PowerSpurs]

In what world does chelsea have the best squad.

If you make a best premier league team and a 2nd beat premier league team (i.e. backs up as subs) there are very few chelsea players that would make it in their unanimously and hardly who you could argue for in there.

If poch does anywhere near to challenging it would be a miracle.

Well you paid £1b for it so if it isn't the joint best something really bad has gone wrong

 

[PowerSpurs]

I don’t want to look at Bolton in the 90’s as a comparison of where we are as a club today and let’s thank our lucky stars

that’s a disingenuous position to take imo…we have moved past that era…there’s a reason those that can’t see fault in Levy hold onto that weak period of our existence

Borough, Charlton

come on man

we are Spurs

I’m not having this

There's a reason PS stuck in that era…it’s the only one in our PL history that gives his argument a position of strength

look at where we are today and we should be delivering a lot more

We are a big club or we are not

Everything says we are

Our stumbling block is the mentality of the owners and a group of the fanbase who love the ‘woe be us’ attitude whilst watching the club take the riches of a big club

Our stumbling block is that we've never been a truly big club. Liverpool, Man Utd and Arsenal have been way more successful than us for the last 50 years and now Man City and Chelsea have been financially doped to leave us behind too.
Mentality is nothing to do with it. We just need more money and Levy continues to deliver on that.

 

[PowerSpurs]

Most of the clubs who were regularly above us in the early days of the PL were left in our slipstream because of severe financial mismanagement that completely failed to take into account the changing nature of the modern game. Blackburn, Leeds, Villa, Bolton, Boro, Charlton all conform to this model so there is zero evidence that their managerial or player appointments were the main cause of their decline. All had unsustainably high wage bills and regularly went on splurges in the market trying to short-cut their way to success.

This area, financial management, is by a distance Levy's strongest suit. Were it not for his financial acumen, his series of poor managerial appointments and transfer strategy would have left us in utter ruin by now. But, mercifully, we've always had the fiscal strength to cope with years pissed down the drain under the likes of Ramos, AVB, Mourinho and millions down the same drain through dud signings. He is also very fortunate that three managerial appointments - two of whom were not his picks - happened to propel us upward to such extents that the impact of the poor appointments around them wasn't as severe.

I didn't claim that poor manager choice was a factor in their decline.
None of Levy's choices have done lasting harm and none have done lasting good. That's quite normal for all clubs until the occasional genius appears. But money is a much better indicator of performance than manager skill

 

[humanbeingincroydon]

Your opening statement is simply wrong. We can only buy the players that Chelsea, Man U, Man C and Liverpool don't want.

The issue is we need to be signing players before they get on too many team's radars, so not just Man Utd, Liverpool, Chelsea, Arsenal and The Sheikh Mansour team but also...

*deep breath*

Atletico Madrid
Sevilla
Borussia Dortmund
Bayer Leverkusen
Juventus
Napoli
Milan
Inter
Atalanta
Paris Saint Germain
Lyon
Marseille

(...and that's also leaving off teams who are frankly mad alchemists when it comes to creating players who can be moved on for £30-50m from nothing like Monster Energy Dusseldorf, Benfica, Porto, Sporting, Ajax, PSV and Feyenoord)

That's broadly the list of clubs we are competing with across Europe, and yet that is the problem we keep running face-first into: we could have signed a player for potentially peanuts but either hesitated or had a manager who wanted finished products only, and that's seen them join one of the teams listed above and the prospective transfer fee go from somewhere in the £5-20m range to £40m or higher within a year or two

Case in point (for the, what, fiftieth time...?) Kim Min-jae could've been picked up at any point in the last 2-3 years for practically nothing, in fact the €3m it took to take him from Beijing Guoan to Fenerbache in the summer of 2021 was pretty much nothing and yet we stayed our hand, and a year later he moved to Napoli for €18m after Conte turned him down - and this summer he moved to Bayern for €50m, meaning we had two good chances to sign him for a fee that we could have broken even on if the worst came to the worst and instead he's basically out of our reach for at least a year and more likely two or three