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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
