Transfer Rumours transfer thread fact and fiction

Wouldn't bet on it

 

If this were to happen, I doubt it'd happen before we play them, regardless of what we offer. No way Pep would strengthen us just before we play each other.

 

Technically it's possible to sign him before we play them. Like, 12 hours before we play them, making him ineligible for the match

Which is what we tried to do when selling Sissoko to Watford, but apparently somebody didn't check the kickoff time and he played against us...

 

There should be a sign hanging outside Tottenham Hotspur. One of those classic old-fashioned ones found in factories stating 'days since last incident'. Last night, someone would have placed a zero next to it.

For we're at that time of year again when the seemingly annual Spurs transfer scramble arrives late in the window, although this time it feels even more desperate than normal after a summer in which big statements have been made and there has been plenty of talking - a remarkable amount for a notoriously quiet club - yet little in the way of backing up those declarations.

It has been another period in which drama has not just constantly knocked on the club's door, it's kicked it down.

For within the space of just three months, Tottenham finally won their first trophy in 17 years, chairman Daniel Levy then declared it wasn't enough and that he wanted to win the Premier League and Champions League so sacked the hself-congratulatory interview mostly about the stadium with Gary Neville in which he said he's sure he'll get the credit for what he's done at Spurs when he's gone, sold the club's star player, saw main playmaker James Maddison lost to an ACL injury and then came the Eberechi Eze mess.

For many Tottenham supporters, that final one on Wednesday evening was the most embarrassing slap to the face to take as the Crystal Palace midfielder prepares to make his way to the other side of north London.

Spurs had gone into Wednesday's round of talks expecting to finally tie up the deal for Eze. They did to an extent, agreeing to Palace's terms after having already agreed to Eze's with the player ready to come to Tottenham. This week had dragged on as Palace had not finalised the deal because they wanted the player to be available for Thursday night's historic first European game for the Eagles.

Oliver Glasner had made it clear on Wednesday morning that Eze was going to start in the following day's UEFA Conference League clash against Fredrikstad and that was that.

Yes, Palace held off on finalising the deal in the past week because of that game but Tottenham have had weeks, months even years to sign Eze if you look at their long-standing interest in the player.ead coach, brought in another, signed Mohammed Kudus, missed out on Morgan Gibbs-White after a messy affair, conducted a ratherSpurs missed out on Gibbs-White almost a month ago when he stood on that pitch in Portugal repeatedly thanking "Mr Marinakis". Maddison fell to the turf in distress in the Seoul World Cup Stadium 18 days ago.

So why Tottenham were still faffing around on August 21 trying to sign a player they desperately needed, one who previously had a release clause, albeit a complicated one, and one they knew had a strong affinity for Arsenal should they come in, defies belief.
Eze has made no secret over the years of the fact that he's a big Arsenal fan and was desperate to play for them again one day after being let go at 13 from their academy. In this two-way fight, Spurs were always going to lose and that is why they needed to get this deal done before their local rivals really needed to come in after Kai Havertz's knee injury.

It all bears echoes of the summer of 2018 when Tottenham messed around over the signing of Jack Grealish from Aston Villa. The Midlands club had financial problems and wanted £25million for the midfielder. Spurs are believed to have offered £3million plus Josh Onomah among the early negotiations.

As the weeks went by, the north London club just assumed they would eventually get Grealish, who like Eze appeared to say his goodbyes to his club's fans and was keen on the move to link up with Mauricio Pochettino. Then Villa suddenly got new investment and when Tottenham scrambled and finally offered around the asking price, it was rejected and Grealish would sign a new contract.

Pochettino was left furious, without the playmaker he felt could push Spurs on and provide real competition and extra creativity alongside Christian Eriksen to keep the Dane fresh.

The then Villa boss Steve Bruce said after the bid was rejected: "If Tottenham had done their work early he would be a Spurs player now."

It's a familiar theme for Spurs and it's one that will follow Levy as the chief negotiator. For as much as the chairman believes the stadium will be his legacy, so to will the narrative of long drawn-out attempts to sign players and the comments from those within the game claiming that dealing with Tottenham over transfers is often a torturous affair.

Those infamous words from Sir Alex Ferguson about dealing with Levy being "more painful than my hip replacement" stick in the public consciousness. Perhaps the Spurs chairman saw it as a badge of honour, but it's not seen that way outside the club.

Other clubs have long, drawn out moves - take Manchester United and Bryan Mbeumo this summer for example - but the difference is that they invariably get the job done. For Tottenham fans it feels like there have been far more very public near misses than big signings ready for the now.

And that was meant to be the key aspect this summer - the need for players for now. Twelve months ago and Ange Postecoglou had pushed Tottenham back up to fifth place and it was time to kick on. Spurs instead signed one ready-made player in Dominic Solanke and otherwise brought in a group of teenagers.

They still managed to win a trophy though so again a need to push on. Regardless of the debate over replacing Postecoglou with Thomas Frank, it created a period of time when Tottenham could not move quickly for targets due to the Dane needing to establish himself, exactly what was required and for the recruitment department to build up their lists for a different kind of head coach.

There were a few obvious candidates though with Frank's feelings on Mbeumo, Christian Norgaard and Yoane Wissa very clear. By the time Tottenham got themselves going though, the first two were locked in on moves to United and Arsenal and Wissa would be dependent at that point on Spurs having the space to move for him which they did not.

Gibbs-White was Frank's top choice for the No.10 role and he'd wanted him since the player's Wolves days. His physical data was perfect alongside his creativity and passing ability.

What happened next has been written about and spoken about at length as well as that secret release clause. Spurs would later put in a higher bid for Gibbs-White than the one that began the saga and there's no escaping the thought process that if they had led with that offer then perhaps Forest, who reportedly were open to selling the player to Manchester City earlier in the summer, and Mr Marinakis might have negotiated rather than shutting everything down.

Instead they had to be content with a phone call from Gibbs-White to Frank, apologising for the way things had played out. Perhaps the transcript of that call will go in the drawer alongside the letter Rivaldo once sent Glenn Hoddle explaining why he chose Milan over Spurs.

Tottenham eventually switched to Eze when they thought Arsenal were cooling their interest. The Palace man's physical data did not match Gibbs-White's but he had that magic in his boots to be a game-changer and there was every belief within Spurs that they could quickly get him up to speed for Frank's fast-moving, pressing system.

That will no longer be necessary. Arsenal made their move, piggy-backing Spurs' negotiations, and showing how a deal can be done quickly.

There has been plenty of talk this summer about Tottenham thinking like a big club but their local rivals showed them how to act like one and that will sting the most inside Hotspur Way.

Eze will be Arsenal's seventh big signing of the summer and Mikel Arteta's side had already spent around £200million before his arrival will be confirmed after Thursday night's European match.

The Gunners finished second in the Premier League while Spurs finished 17th yet have signed just one big new face in the £55million Kudus, as well as a loan deal for Joao Palhinha. How is that gap meant to be closed?

There's very little new about Frank's squad for a season in which Levy has made it clear that he expects the club to compete on all fronts, with the Champions League back on the menu.

Tottenham must react to this latest transfer window mess in a big way but time is running out to sign the No.10, winger and centre-back that Frank wants. They have around a week-and-a-half to do what they've had months to achieve and every club will smell their desperation from a mile away while knowing they had the funds to sign Gibbs-White and Eze and attempt to move for Savinho.

There's been a lot of trying and it's all been particularly trying for the Tottenham supporters, who were sold a dream of pushing on and challenging for everything and have instead been handed the same old scenario of late transfer scrambles and a club bring reactive rather than proactive. Players galore will be linked with Spurs in the coming days, many of whom will be nowhere near the level they need.

There are frequent appraisals of departments within Tottenham every year as the club examines how they can be better with changes aplenty often made. The same will have to apply to the recruitment side of things when this summer ends, including Levy's own role as the closer in any negotiations. Spurs are nowhere near where they should be by this point in the transfer window.

This was meant to be a time of kicking on after a special night in Bilbao when the club finally shed the 'Spursy' tag. Much of what has happened since feels like someone has stuck it back on with Sellotape.

Eze come, Eze go? Unfortunately he went and now Tottenham must once again scramble to save their summer and ensure Thomas Frank has some chance of meeting expectations that currently have little place in reality.

Alasdair Gold
.

 

"Siri, define 'soon', thank you?"

 

Feck me I thought that was YOUR rant for a bit....

Difficult to disagree with AG though in many aspects.

I've stopped worrying about this window and just trying to remain positive. I think Kudus and Palinha are both significant improvements and hoping that the 'potential' becomes 'reality' in the likes of Sarr, Bergvall, Gray and Spence etc.

But there again, I still believe in Father Xmas.....

 

..as well as the Easter bunny for me.

 

I believe that Mr Micawber is sucking the life out of this football club. Even when we have money to invest in much needed talent, we behave like every penny spent will lead us closer to the poor house. We prevaricate, piss people off, renegotiate, prevaricate some more...and regular as clockwork, we end up losing out to other buyers, running out of time and buying **** alternatives.

Change the faces below Levy...a d it always ends up the same. He kills momentum and hope.

I'm just waiting for the bloke to **** off.

 

I agree with most of that except the Grealish stuff where the timeline isn't right as the takeover negotiations started at the beginning of the window and the new owners would have had a veto.
But Levy has been in charge more than 20 years and probably makes at least 10 big decisions a year. A 55% success rate in decisions is world class in areas where success can easily be measured. So he can have got close to 100 decisions wrong so far and still be the best Chairman in the world.

 

...but he isn't.

In sporting terms, he's dragging us back to where we were when Sugar left.

Our turnover of coaches is akin to a club annually fighting relegation...when all the fight is totally internal...with the Chairman. He's lost his way and is now repeating the same obvious mistakes, getting the same mediocre results and wasting untold amounts of money, as he goes about his deludedly self-satisfied way.

The longer he stays, the greater the task for the next owner/Chairman...and the longer I will not watch MY football club. I won't be back until he's gone.

 

Earlier this month, my Spurs WhatsApp group was debating whether, if you could only have one, you’d sign EberechiEze or Savinho. Ever the ray of sunshine, I confessed that my “gut feeling” was that we wouldn’t get either.

A few days later, despite reports suggesting Eze was practically on the 149 bus heading for N17, I had the nagging sense that Arsenal might gazump us at the last minute. The reason for such a grim forecast was that I’d seen this tragi-comic movie before. Spurs have “nearly” signed everyone from Jean-Pierre Papin to Eden Hazard to Rivaldo, who famously wrote to Glenn Hoddle outlining why he’d inexplicably chosen San Siro over White Hart Lane.
All clubs miss out on transfers from time to time. My pessimism sprang from somewhere else, somewhere darker and more psychologically deep-rooted.

Supporting Tottenham Hotspur so often means imagining the most ludicrous, embarrassing thing that could possibly befall the club and then knowing, with crystal clarity, that it’s going to happen. Fans of other clubs – Wimbledon, Bury or Morecambe – have had it much worse, but no other club so expertly combines the slapstick and the high-profile. At Tottenham we wait until everyone is watching, then we slip on the banana skin.

Think missing out on the Champions League because of a dodgy lasagne, or blowing a 2-0 lead in a European tie to a team whose manager is in prison. Think the famous “Lads, it’s Tottenham” game, which warped my expectations of football – and indeed life – as an 18-year-old in the stands in growing horror. Far from breaking the curse, the Europa League triumph seems merely to have angered the footballing gods, who swiftly set about restoring the karmic balance via the Morgan Gibbs-White debacle, the heartbreaking injury to James Maddison, and now this.

Missing out on Eze is a worthy addition to the pantheon of pratfalls, although not necessarily because of the player himself. A fine footballer he may be, but Eze isn’t necessarily the right fit for the gap left by Maddison’s injury. Right now, Spurs badly lack passing ability and there are better candidates who are younger, cheaper and have a higher ceiling than Eze. No, there are two reasons this one will stick in the collective psyche of Spurs fans. The first, of course, is that we’ve been done over by that lot up the road, who appear to have been stealthily plotting for weeks, even as details of our haggling over add-ons and chairman-to-chairman talks played out in public.

Arsenal fans won’t tire of reminding us about this all season; in the office, the pub and in the ground. More than that, though, this episode encapsulates the reign of Daniel Levy in microcosm. While rivals act decisively, we dither in the hope of a better deal, then miss out entirely. We spend but not quite enough, unwisely, or at the wrong time. We are all mouth – Levy says he wants to win the Premier League and Champions League – and no trousers. When it comes to transfers, the failure of Levy-era Tottenham to match his supposed ambition does not even have in it, to paraphrase the great Bill Nicholson, an echo of glory. Rather it is an echo of iincompetence.

Nobody can argue with what Levy has achieved, delivering state-of-the-art facilities, a world-leading stadium and a regular place – albeit a fragile one – at football’s top table. For all the vitriol that is aimed at Levy, many of us are grateful for what he has done. But Levy is like a man who spends thousands of pounds tricking out a car that he never takes out of the garage because of the price of petrol. What was the point if you’re not going to test what it can do?

There remain many reasons to be optimistic about this season. Tottenham have a tactically astute new manager, taking charge of a squad that is both young and underrated after last year’s freakshow. The scouting set-up and club administration have been professionalised, putting Tottenham on a good footing for the future.

Yet, as long as the clownish blunders continue, the calls will grow louder for Levy to step aside, to find a new steward for Spurs, one who refuses to allow the club and its fans to be the butt of every joke. The game, after all, is supposed to be about glory.

Rob Davies (The Guardian) another satisfied customer who sees COYS Daniel as the No 1 chairman...

 

Crystal Palace and Eze are duplicitous liars. Palace said they wanted Eze for their European debut but he did not play last night. Eze agreed employment terms with our club. I wish them all the worst and both to fail miserably. Now I will get back to supporting my club

 

According to Glasner Eze just refused to play last night. I think Palace expected him to play. Not a lot can be done if so. Stop the transfer out of spite?

 

He was in the registered squad, too. I wonder why he didn't play?

 

Arsenal probably got to him. Serves Palace right.

 

Heinous crime to allow fans to have the piss taken out of them. I understand why that matters to some but it shouldn't matter to Levy.
Unless you think we should never have gone for Gibbs-White or Eze in case it went wrong or we should have paid millions over our valuation to make sure it didn't.

 

If the argument boils down to "Fans are making fun of my club on social media" then it's not really an argument because it ignores the fact which fans are doing it: primarily fans of Arsenal and Chelsea, who are totally unbiased about this, with the usual smattering of Man Utd and Barca fans from Lagos joining in

A quick look at any r/soccer circlejerk, let alone the brainrot that is Football Twitter, makes it abundantly clear that rival fans taking the piss out of the club is such a trivial complaint that it's...actually on brand for the Grauniad's level of reporting these days

 

As I've said elsewhere, there is nothing at all remarkable about Daniel Levy in the transfer market. The overwhelming majority of signings made in his tenure have been vanilla in an unambitious shade of beige.

We go for players for whom we faced little to no competition. Players who are of absolutely no interest to the teams we aspire to overtake. Players who will therefore nine times out of ten be horrendously overpriced and overpaid.

Because they do not represent a true measure of the size of our club and its aspirations.

I stand by what I said a week ago:

Alan Sugar had many, many faults, but unless my childhood memory is playing tricks on me, his track record in the transfer market was a damn sight more impressive - especially relative to the fact that he'd just taken over a bankrupt operation - than what we've seen under Levy.

How many players have we signed in 23 years who made you raise an eyebrow and nod in genuine respect, as opposed to frown in outright confusion?

Dumitrescu, Klinnsman, Sir Les, Armstrong, Ginola, Sherwood, Rebrov, Ziege, Poyet.

None of those players had careers that should have seen them wind up at a club like Spurs, and yet they did.

I sit racking my brains to come up with more than a handful of equally impressive signings made by Levy, and all I end up with is Berbatov, Modric and Van Der Vaart...and the latter was practically signed by accident.

Significantly, you'll notice that it has been more than 15 years since we made a signing that raised an eyebrow. By my analysis, that is roughly when football left Daniel Levy behind.

 

Dumitrescu, Klinnsman, Sir Les, Armstrong, Ginola, Sherwood, Rebrov, Ziege, Poyet.
Seriously?
Most signed in the twilight of their careers and I reckon, even at their best only two maximum would have got into Poch's best team and only Ziege would have really strengthened it

 

Tell them Frank!

Some of these journalists are arseholes! Trying to get Frank to betray his principles of not speaking about others teams players.

Well handled though.