Many of those signings are young players, who the club hope will develop. A couple, in Maddison and van der Ven, were already decent, but were ready to step up to a higher level. Johnson was a hybrid of those two categories. £65M looks a lot of money for Solanke. He has proved that he can score goals regularly at PL level, but is no Haaland or Salah. He’s not even a Watkins. He lacks the speed of thought and movement to play in a dynamic front three, which relies on quick interplay. Spurs transfers in this period are currently 5/10, with potential to improve that score. The best signings were from last season. The more recent recruitment is open to question. But transfers usually work best when they are seamless. Either a player is a perfect fit for the role required or they add to the squad and have time to be integrated. When you are buying players who are not established PL performers and the emphasis is on youth, then you have to accept that it is a work in progress and may take time to reach fruition.
I've just done a post which explains why I think the opposite. Please help me by telling me where I am wrong.
I would say wins are the best measurement because to win a game you’ll generally need to be the better team in both defence and attack. Scoring lots of goals should in principle win you a lot games but it doesn’t take into account the spread of them. It would probably be better to score roughly two goals a game, as that in theory should result in a win or a draw in most cases, rather than score 4+ every few games but then scoring just 1 or 0 in others which would likely result in losses or draws.
The whole point of having several performance measures is that they tell you different things about the performance. Leicester won the League because they won a ridiculously high number of games by a single goal. Some people will tell you that that was down to good game management. I think it was more down to luck. Improving your goal difference makes you less susceptible to good and bad luck which I think makes it the best performance measurement. If we went a whole season with our current goal difference per match and lost as many games as we won then (1) I would be amazed but (2) it would point to a weakness that we could actually do something about, namely that we play massively better when we are winning. I don't think this is actually true based on the season so far. We've just been unlucky with the way goals have been distributed.
If you model when goals are scored or conceded they are pretty much randomly distributed over the games though. Better teams score more and concede fewer but there isn't much evidence that even the very best control which games they score or concede in.
I don’t think you can be lucky over 38 games a season. Leicester rightfully earned their league title, it wasn’t a fluke or luck. It was a freakish outcome and an extremely rare sporting achievement but not luck. I wouldn’t say we’ve been unlucky. We’ve just simply not been consistent enough.
Of course not but my point is we seem to score a lot in one game and are then limp or almost limp in others. We lack consistency. Tactically I also find us quite naive. At times some pragmatism is needed especially defensively but Ange has more or less rejected that notion when questioned on such.
38 matches is nowhere near enough to eliminate the effects of luck but I agree they rightfully earned their league title because the only criteria is getting the most points. 9 matches is totally insufficient to measure consistency.
I’ve regularly highlighted in this thread it’s not just the opening 9 matches though, our last 37 league games has seen us lose 16. The initial arguments from some on here was that they’re seeing progression and improvement, my counter point is that we’re not based on the fact we’re still having the same issues as last season and continuing its form.
But I don't think we are. We are conceding many fewer goals than last season whilst scoring about the same number. It's just that that isn't yet feeding into results.
He doesn't believe it is. He did it against West Ham a little over a week ago, then discussed it afterwards.
Transfer Markets have us at €420m since Ange arrived. That's £350m. That includes both kuluchevski & porro. My point re Conte was that he didn't replace our keeper. He also didn't replace our defenders or have to replace Kane...all of which Ange has had to do.guess I guess we ain't gonna agree so I'll stop boring people
In the context of this discussion what I meant by game management is the theory that you can design tactics to increase the chances of winning by a single goal above where they would be by random chance given your likely goal difference. Ange's tactics seem designed to maximise goal difference as far as I can see.
Yeah you don’t win a title by being lucky and you don’t go nearly 20 years without a trophy just by being unlucky.
I agree with the sentiment of that statement. However those 20 years are also occupied by the rise of Chelsea and ManC, who have not had to compete by normal economic means. Obviously they have hoovered up a lot of trophies. I suspect that if those clubs had not been taken over, the distribution of trophies would be a lot different and, perhaps, we would have been closer to winning one or two.
I don't believe in luck, but Leicester benefited from very fortunate timing to win the league. Their points total wouldn't have even got 2nd in most recent campaigns. It would've got them 4th last season. The same is true of a lot of cup successes. Draws definitely influence the likelihood of lifting one. You can plan all you like, but playing worse teams is certainly easier, isn't it?
When Conte joined part way through that season I think Lloris had signed a new deal that summer so replacing him wasn’t on his or the club’s agenda I’d imagine. Conte and Mourinho both wanted defensive reinforcements though. Jose wanted Skriniar and got Rodon, Conte wanted Bastoni and got Lenglet on loan. Ange wanted van de Ven and Dragusin and got van de Ven and Dragusin. The club was regularly making “club signings” under those (and even Poch), we may not know for sure until a year or two but I believe Ange has gotten every player he’s directly asked for as a primary target and not anyone on the “B list”.
Weren't van de Ven and Dragusin both Plan Bs? I'm sure we were supposed to be signing Todibo and Tapsoba or something.
