Exactly. Every club has expensive duds. You just have to hope the club has learnt lessons and try to minimise the risk with every signing.
The current recruitment team at Spurs is not the same as it was before.
Transfer Rumours transfer thread fact and fiction
- Thread starter remembercolinlee
- Start date
-
Please bear with us on the new site integration and fixing any known bugs over the coming days. If you can not log in please try resetting your password and check your spam box. If you have tried these steps and are still struggling email [email protected] with your username/registered email address
-
Exactly. Every club has expensive duds. You just have to hope the club has learnt lessons and try to minimise the risk with every signing.
The current recruitment team at Spurs is not the same as it was before.
To make this "true and fair" , you need some
"adjusted for inflation" alignments to the most
recent signings in that list (ex : Modric cost X in
2008, which would be Y in 2024 etc) .
The fact that they were the most expensive signings for the club covers the need for any inflation adjustments. The 16 million for Bent was a crazy sum at the time, or so many of us thought. We don't need adjustments unless of course you were too young to remember that particular signing. Greaves was also a transfer record not just for Spurs but the whole league and that was slightly successful.
The biggest issue with Barren Dent (one of them, anyway...) was it was a club record fee for a player Martin Jol specifically told Comolli not to look for in the first place
It's one thing to sign a player the manager didn't want, quite another to sign a player when the manager specifically said not to sign anyone in their position
How much you spend on your top signings reflects the wealth of the signing club, whether they are successful or not is as always a matter of chance. This is always true and Levy's search for people to find players reflects the difficulty of transfers. In Spurs case they have to gamble on players like Ndombele because if their was no doubting his abilities he would be playing at Real Madrid or City. Finding Bale and Modric proves that it can work and that's what Spurs have to try for.
To be fair, CK, you've generally been against the first part of your point, often citing Gil's failure as a reason to avoid spending relatively big on young players.
Whilst I agree our big money signings have often been poor, I don't think it should act as a deterrent for future signings.
That said, the amount we spend on players isn't the main concern for me, it's more about targetting the right types of players to fit the system and the real intent to improve the team and squad - the latter we've not seen enough of so far this window. Intent in the market for me though is just as much signing Perisic on a free or Bale on a returning loan than it is spending £40m+ on van de Ven and Porro.
In terms of genuinely good players not wanting to join, I guess that depends on where those brackets lie for you. I'd say Romero for instance was a genuinely good player, he'd won Serie A defender of the year and was being selected for Argentina. But can we for instance go and sign Musiala from Bayern or Rodri from City? Not a chance. I do think Spurs have a big presence in football though, perhaps a bigger one than you're maybe giving credit for and I see no reason why we can't target some very good players before the window shuts, who those players are can be open for debate of course.
Ange has repeatedly said he isn't interested in the stepping stone model.
It served us well back in the day when we used the departures of players like Carrick, Berbatov, Modric and (less successfully) Bale to improve the wider team and inch our way forward.
But the evidence clearly shows that it doesn't bring you close enough to actual success. We only took that step when we started signing players for the long term, fending off outside interest for as long as possible. Our steadily rising wage ceiling helped this massively.
The likes of Jan, Toby, Eriksen, Son and Hugo wouldn't have spent basically their entire careers at Spurs back in the day, they'd have been off within 2-3 years to a bigger club. And we were better for it.
When I say we acted like a big club when we weren't really one, I think the single most important difference is that we acted like dropping £60m on a player didn't matter one iota, i.e. that it was a risk worth taking and we could absorb the impact if it went wrong.
That part wasn't remotely true. Whereas the likes of United, Chelsea and City can and have spent that money and simply spend it again if it didn't work the first time, if we spend that kind of money and it doesn't work, we are lumped with the players and temporarily crippled financially.
Ndombele and Lo Celso are the clearest examples of this. Not only did their expenditure prevent us in part from spending that kind of money again for a few years, we were lumped with both players and didn't address either position until it was overwhelmingly obvious that a procession of managers couldn't coax a performance out of either of them, at which point we finally went back into the market and Signed Bentancur, Bissouma and Maddison in an attempt to cover the positions those two were signed to cover.
No it doesn't.
The cost of signing a player any club is RELATIVE to the
cost of their PEERS, at the SAME or OTHER clubs.
A simple example is Berbatoss vs Bent.
The inflation adjusted figures are 11.2 vs 16.5 million.
A basic ROI expectation would be that Bent
is 16.5 / 11.2 = 1.47x more productive than Berbatoss.
The reality is that he was 10% less.
So you’re saying the club took risks on Ndombele and Lo Celso that they couldn’t financially cover if they went wrong (they did)
That sounds very unlike Spurs.
1. None of them were "big signings" .
2. When they did become good, domestic rivals could
neither afford them nor offer any guaranteed PL/CL
medals than Spurs could (in stark contrast to 2006-2013)
3. The three WC Spurs players of the past 15 years
have been sold for big money, and not to PL rivals.
The lesson of :
- #2 is to remain more/as competitive as rivals with
equal/deeper pockets
- #3 is to prevent the likes of Carrick and Berbatoss.
It would be indeed.
Even the Wuhan flu did not damage the finances
to the extent that NDombele and GLC being failures
would hit the "bottom line" .
Spurs are in now in a position where such failures
(at the historical rates) are not a big financial hit.
Which means the problem can be restated as :
can we devise the processes that minimise such hits ??
No
I'm saying we could only afford to take those risks once every 3-4 years. Bigger clubs take them every year, sometimes multiple times in one window.
I'm also not saying we shouldn't take those risks, just that when we do, we shouldn't be blind to the knock on affect they will have if they go wrong.
Fortunately, the financial impact of the stadium is starting to narrow the field of impact, which is presumably why we are seemingly open to spending £60m+ on a striker despite having spent that on another striker two years ago.
A good player but £85 million!! It’s mad.£85m for Alvarez?!!
What
The
Actual
F
It really highlights the dearth of good strikers out there.
It clearly doesn't for you but I suspect most are happier with the simple model.
It doesn't for me as a supporter, and it doesn't for the finances or on-pitch success of the club.