The issue with Poch 's sacking is it looks like a bad decision if you start the clock at the start of the 2019-20 season as he was sacked three months into a rebuild - however if you start the clock in the 2018-19 season it looks like less of a bad decision due to our form utterly nosediving after Christmas and the CL run papered over a lot of cracks, and it also has to be said his squad management was actively going backwards as he was running a core of players into the ground while ignoring the rest of the squad players - and add to that the number of academy prospects who were slipping through our fingers because they were neither getting minutes for the first team nor were they allowed to get regular football on loan, to the point where the agents of half a dozen players effectively had to issue demands that their clients get loaned out So there were a lot of issues which were going to come to a head at some point that were evident during the 2018-19 season, and it was the failure to reverse the previous season's downturn in form which ultimately got Poch the sack There's definitely been other managers who were backed previously, though: Martin Jol was certainly backed when Arnesen was DoF and that continued for a decent period when Comolli took over - although when Comolli got drunk with power and started ignoring Jol's requests while openly demanding we bring in Juande Ramos, Levy definitely should have put his foot down and supported Jol there, and frankly put Comolli on gardening leave to remind him who the boss actually is Even Villas-Boas was backed, as he wanted a DoF in place and that's why Baldini was brought in - before Baldini unintentionally sabotaged Villas-Boas by buying half a squad with the Bale money without sanctioning any sales, meaning Villas-Boas had to effectively balance two teams worth of players expecting starting football, which predictably flamed out first when Villas-Boas had us playing far more insular football than the previous season, then when he suddenly flipped to trying to make the team play expansive football the results didn't so much go south as produce goal differences which resemble the bottom half of a clockface
Simon Jones at the Wail says Nottingham Forest are interested in Davison Sanchez How convenient: Simon Jones at the Wail says we're considering a move for Brennan Johnson
I think I would define it a bit differently in terms of the competitive landscape and where Spurs currently are. There are ultimately a handful of what you might call ‘final destination’ (sorry) clubs - Real Madrid, Manchester City, Barcelona, maybe Bayern Munich. These are the clubs who dominate or regularly win their domestic leagues and regularly compete at the sharp end of the CL. The rest of the elite clubs - Manchester United, Juve, Dortmund, Chelsea (who would have been top tier until the mess of the last few years), Liverpool, Arsenal, Athletico Madrid, Inter, AC Milan, Ajax, PSG, etc, these clubs win trophies fairly regularly (some more so than others, and often the league if it’s less competitive) and regularly play in the CL, rarely dropping out of Europe entirely. But even though some of them are extremely wealthy, they’re vulnerable to those in the tier above, in terms of losing key players and staff to them. Then you have Atalanta, Brighton, those kind of clubs. They develop talent and sell it up the pyramid. Dortmund and Ajax in the tier above for example do that too of course, but they are in less competitive leagues so they can maintain that status while blooding youngsters. The issue Spurs have ran into (quite aside from the fact that Levy can’t run the club as he used to, as I outlined earlier) is that we are firmly stuck between tiers 2 and 3. I’ve said in the past that Levy has tried to jump that gap in a way no other club has managed, which is admirable and ambitious. There is a hierarchy in football and no club has I believe bridged it without significant outside investment (City, for example. Newcastle are up next). It is EXTREMELY difficult to move up the pyramid. Brighton recruit players and managers excellently in recent times but they would need to keep that streak up while investing in infrastructure and keeping key players and staff - one wring move and they’re back to square 1. I think Levy had some good luck along the way but ultimately managed to deliver the infrastructure while keeping us in Europe, often the CL, for a number of consecutive years. We hugely relied on our academy landing one of the greatest players in the club’s history, and finding one of our most successful managers of the PL era, at the same time we were building a stadium and would be financially hamstrung by it. But back to the point. We can’t (or have had managers who won’t) offer the playing time and developmental opportunities to young players that would get at Brighton, or Atalanta, or RB Leipzig. We haven’t had plans for young players despite surely being aware that they’d need time to play and improve (no network of friendly or co-owned clubs to loan players to, for example). But we also can’t offer the potential of trophy opportunity that the Tier 2 elite clubs can. We exist in a vacuum, in a space for which there is no need. In the grander football ecosystem, the club is in effect pointless. A player or even an aspirational scout, or analyst, will see the lack of a vision, constantly changing briefs, and go elsewhere, where they will have a greater opportunity to win, or to improve. We’re not competing with anyone because we have no idea what we are. There is no need in the PL for a club of Spurs’s current standing. Step 1 for us needs to be accepting this and then Step 2 needs to be buying fully into a coach that hopefully, you have selected correctly. We should now have, while not financial parity with the tier above us, at least be close enough to compete. But we have a small dog mentality around not wanting to be seen as taking a loss on players, and not wanting to deal with the clubs around us. We’ve been all bark and no bite for too long. Ange is as good as we could have hoped for, and I don’t mean that in a disparaging way. I HOPE that we have found a diamond in the rough, a modern coach with a top mentality who has been overlooked because of where he’s from and his career path. If he delivers, and the club delivers for him, we can hopefully rejuvenate the squad and get enough buy-in from incumbents and clarity on the football pitch to aid future recruitment. But all that needs to work, for years, and we need to win some pots, if we ever want to actually break the ceiling.
I think we all know that paying for things isn't a winning strategy done right. See man u, us and to a certain extent the money levy has been splashing out recently
The issue our recruitment/actually bothering to use players has had in the last 4-5 years, possibly a little longer, is we seem to have adopted an attitude that we should only look to sign players from a very narrow choice of leagues, namely the Premier League, Championship, La Liga, Bundesliga, Serie A, Ligue 1, Eredivisie and the Primeira Liga This approach has two massive problems with it: first of all the minor issue that most clubs have scouts looking at those leagues, unlike say a decade ago where so many PL clubs were looking at La Liga or Ligue 1 that it was actually smart business for us to look at the Eredivisie as that was a practically untapped resource, hence we got Vertonghen and Eriksen sorted quickly and cleanly as the other clubs around our level were bumping into each other in Lyon, Monaco, Marseille or wherever The second issue is that this has us overlooking a lot of potential talent who would only come onto our radar if they moved to France/Holland/Spain/wherever, which automatically jacks up the likely transfer fee, as a player who could have been bought for £5m from a Belgian/Danish/Swiss/Austrian/wherever club which does put the player's development on the shoulders of whichever club buys them - but also puts them in a position to expect four, five or six times what they paid for them when we come a-knocking, and there's a laundry list of players who fall under that description we've been linked with after their expected transfer fee has skyrocketed, with Kim Min-jae and Jonathan David the most obvious However, there's another issue: even in the leagues we do watch we don't spot a potential diamond, case in point Ndombele was at Amiens and we could've bought him for something like £6-8m, but apparently we never looked at him while Lyon's scouts did, or there's us turning down Harry Maguire and Andy Robertson when they were available for the sort of fees that are easy to break even on if the player doesn't work out, which is both a reason why the squad refresh slowed to a crawl while is also actively costing us more money than it needs to And it does have to be said this mentality does seem to have trickled down to a section of the fanbase who definitely don't get bloody exhausting, as there's a sneering attitude to being linked to a player in the Belgian or Danish or Ukrainian or wherever leagues as if they're not good enough that has definitely started doing the rounds about Solomon, but not only that there is also the attitude that we should only sign players from the "good" teams in the leagues we are apparently allowed to sign players from which is already creeping into the discourse about Vicario as he "only" played for Empoli when if we're signing from Italian clubs the only ones permitted are Juve, Inter, Milan, Napoli, Roma and Atalanta, and that line of thinking is utterly bizarre, as if they cannot tell the difference between reality and whatever EA are calling FIFA these days
I don't think he ever really knew what he was doing tbh. So many of his decisions since day 1 have resembled the thought patterns of a young fan playing a computer game. From appointing Hoddle to win early popularity, to the weird ongoing fetish with Chelsea since Abramovich turned us down, and the more specific fetish with big name big CV managers (Santini, Ramos, Maureen and Conte) all of whom have crashed and burned rather than delivering the success he thought they would bring. In my opinion, and ironically I think @PowerSpurs might even agree with this, there is no evidence Levy or indeed any chairman of any club has a clue what they are doing in a footballing sense. They tend to be good at one thing - making money. And that by extension tends to be the only thing that makes success more likely in the modern era. The most sensible course of action would therefore be for chairmen/people to excuse themselves almost entirely from day to day running of the sporting side of the club. I've been calling for this for years and it is why I was very pleased (albeit short-lived) when we appointed Fabio, and even more pleased to hear about the new role led by Scott Munn. Perhaps the single biggest problem is that Levy thinks he understands football. But this is plain hubris. As a man who has dedicated a well above average time to business and finance, he is probably closer to Todd Boehly than anyone on this forum in his actual expertise in the game. The result of his hubris, perhaps the by product of still being an over-eager childhood fan of the club, is that historically he has been far, far too close to far, far too many footballing decisions over the years. From managerial hiring and firing, to transfer deals, to player contracts, to little "intervention" meetings with underperforming players (GCSE pep talk with a bemused Ndombele anyone?) And the sum of it all is: It hasn't helped. We've lurched from mini era to mini era occasionally chancing upon a formula that works, in the BMJ Harry and Poch tenures. But Levy is Levy - a slightly more knowledgeable version of Todd Boehly. When those eras accidentally fell in his lap, he didn't know what to do with them. We are fortunate, as I said earlier, that Levy's financial genius has ironically largely insulated us from Levy's footballing stupidity. But as ours and the PL's status rises exponentially, we have less room to stumble into lucky solutions. Even the simple ones cost an absolute fortune and an ever growing wage bill makes it ever harder to fix any mistakes made. It is no coincidence that clubs that devolve footballing decisions to those who actually live and breathe the game have tended to do well in recent years. City, Liverpool, Arsenal, Villa, Brighton, Brentford etc. Whereas those where the financiers still fancy themselves as pundits have struggled, and I would include us, United, Chelsea, Everton and Leeds in that category among others.
There is perhaps something in what you say about where we source players from. But I think it’s almost more important to consider why we buy players. We got GLC and Ndombele to be the future of our midfield, then appointed a series of managers who didn’t play football that suited them. Why invest that kind of money and not try and make it work? One of the biggest problems with our recruitment is that we just seem to think that good players are good players, full stop. At the narrowest end of elite football, Kane and Son for example, this is true. They could at their peak play for pretty much any team in any system you can think of. But the majority of players don’t have such immutable quality. There are plenty of good players out there in environments that don’t suit them. There have been, and continue to be, a few at Spurs.
TBH I don't think any manager could get Ndombele to work effectively in the Premier League, partly as he just doesn't have the stamina or workrate to be effective on a consistent level, but mainly as he's the worst kind of luxury player as he effectively needs a team to be molded around him to both take advantage of his positives but especially to mitigate his negatives The former issue can certainly be worked around, as we demonstrated with van der Vaart of Kranjcar in the past where they might not be able to consistently play at their best for 90 minutes but they can work in the right system with the right players around them - but the latter one can't be worked around because he's central to the tactical plan like Taarabt was at QPR Realistically, the problem with the summer of 2019 was we were buying players to replicate a role in Poch's tactical plan from 2015-18 - Ndombele was to replicate Dembele in the creative bulldozer role, even though while he had the dribbling and control to do so and his passing was better that Dembele's, he lacked the raw physicality to go with his skill that Dembele had - Sessegnon was almost a straight swap for Danny Rose - Lo Celso was sort of a hybrid of Dele and Lamela, combining Dele's late runs into the box to score with Lamela's grit and ****ehousery - Jack Clarke was the pacey winger off the bench that N'Jie/Nkoudou were That's ultimately why we signed the players we did in 2019, and that is also the issue: rather than evolve the tactics we had, not least as 433 was replacing 4231 as the effective meta, we were replicating the tactics of two or three seasons before with different players as if teams hadn't already cracked how to deal with them, and the only exception to a tactical change was playing Juan Foyth as a RB, because the Walker replicant that was Aurier was a bloody liability
I agree on Ndombele. He’s not sustainable in modern football. He’s not a durable, constantly available player, and when he is on the pitch he’s too much of a weak link out of possession. Even if you were minded and able to craft a system that could compete with the elite with him on the pitch, he’s always picking up little knocks here and there. It wouldn’t be worth the time. I understand the theory behind signing the players we did then, I just find it weird that we invested large sums on transfer fees and wages and never actually committed to playing in a way that would suit the recruits. Just another symptom of dysfunctional Tottenham.
You are right in poch having had a downturn in form from the cl run and thinking back i agree that unlike when he first came in and cleared out the squad and gave everyone a chance, he stopped trusting his squad players. Still though, 1 season of poor form with 3 months of bedding in new players and system does seem a bit too early in sacking a manager after having given him loads of money imo
The big, big question mark over Poch which I guess we'll find out now that he's with you, is to what extent was our 'peak' under him due to so many of the other big teams being pants at precisely the right time? Don't get me wrong, indisputably our best PL era manager by a distance and produced unbelievably good football, but it will be interesting seeing how he fares now that all of City, Liverpool, Arsenal and United are considerably stronger than there were through most of his time at Spurs. Even you were pretty crap apart from that one amazing season under Conte...when you pipped us to the title. There were so many factors that contributed to our downturn under him. Injuries to key players, lack of investment, playing away from home for almost two years...these are all huge factors. But so is the fact that most of the teams I mentioned above were resurgent at that time, plus Arsenal and Newcastle more recently. Time will tell. For obvious reasons, I hope he relegates you and solidifies his status as a Spurs legend.
So apparently today is 'D Day' for Bayern and Kane. We cannot allow this saga to drag on any longer. They either meet our valuation of him by midweek or the deal is off.
Dan Kilpatrick says that, if a deal with Bayern is not reached before our match with Brentford, Harry Kane is staying Cue two weeks of Bayern officials being made to wait outside Levy's office until he walks past them at the end of the day and says "Sorry, didn't know you were there" while the Bayern press floods the Ruhr valley with their tears
Sorry but that is far, far too late. They've had the whole summer to sort this out. We cannot allow a situation where Ange is tasked with replacing his best player a day before the season kicks off. It gives us two weeks to sort it out and selling clubs will know we are desperate and have loads of cash. End of this week or they can piss off back to Bavaria.
this is very interesting. Dan KP also said that apparently Kane believes that it’s unfair on the manager/team to leave so late in the window. so it’s now on Levy. Does he just keep saying “no” for the next 2 weeks and ensure we have Kane next season, or does he cash in? Surely anyone who wants the best for the club keeps Harry Kane?
By that same logic Bayern have both had a whole year to replace Lewandowski and have had the whole summer to make a bid which comes close to what we deem acceptable without running to their media bitch boys to cry some more
I think we all know the replacement's already at the club, so the timing of Kane's potential departure is semi-irrelevant as we'd only be looking to bring in a backup.
