Genuinely hope you're right mate but after Sol Campbell (was at spurs as a kid, said he'd never join Arsenal, that he loved spurs, that he may leave but probably would sign a contract, was Tottenham through and through etc.) I have NO faith in any player
Sorry to break it to you, but that's what we said too when we moved to the Emirates. The reality unfortunately turns out to be something different. It's a shame you didn't want to continue the Bale thread on the Spurs board, because NSIS point about Bale's agent being a parasite is right, but he misplaces the faith in the player who employs him. His agent will try and secure the best footballing option for Bale as well as the biggest financial slice for himself that he can. Does that sound cynical ? Sorry but that's the way it is. Arsenal are a massive club with huge tradition who have been littered with top class players and still have lost them to the money men. It's a buyers market with Bale, he has indicated that he wants Champions League football - and if Spurs don't give it to him, there are plenty who will and who will also offer him more to do so.
Your stadium currently looks like a pipe dream, as it will cost at least 500 million and rising every year you put it of. Unless you have some benefactor that is willing to fund the whole project you will inevitably have to take a hit in the short term, the idea that building a new stadium is to compete, is slightly misleading as this will only have a long term effect, in the short to medium term it will mean you are less likely to compete. Arsenal are the only major team in the last decade to build a new stadium and it affected our ability to compete for almost a decade. Plenty of other clubs have wanted to build but have not been able to because of the short to medium term impact, and spurs will be no different.
My understanding is that the cost of a new stadium does not have to be included in the FFP rules. That means only Chelsea, Man City, etc will be able to build a new stadium, but they only need to so they can increase the match revenue to meet the FFP rules. The rest of us (Arsenal included) need to find the money from within our revenue which is why Arsenal have had to make money on transfers. I just hope with the finances supposedly sorted and new sponsorship deals in place it is finally over and we can try to compete again.
The reason you lost your best players are not to do with your stadium. At first it was because the likes of Vieira and Henry simply wanted to move on. They loved Arsenal but it's not the same as being an Arsenal fan from a kid, it was never their dream to play for Arsenal so it was never going to be enough to keep them there forever. You can probably count Fabregas under that too, they're simply unavoidable. Then there was the continual problem of not sorting out your best players with regular long term contracts. That led to the likes of Flamini, Van Persie, Clichy and Nasri all leaving with Walcott also having the option to. The trouble is then that the club lose all their power to keep the player if they decide they want out. The only player who's left so far solely over money is Flamini and that's not because you couldn't afford him but because another side was prepared to give big wages to an average player. The rest was a combination of lack of trophies, lack of ambition and of course money. The fact that you have a much greater matchday turnover than most other clubs helps you spend more and compete, just because players are leaving and you are at times paying over the odds for average replacements doesn't mean that it's the stadium's fault. The reason you're the only one is because most big clubs don't need a new stadium. Liverpool and Chelsea are probably the only big clubs in the last decade that could have used a whole new stadium and Chelsea didn't care that much because they don't need the money from it. Stadiums take a longtime to sort out and we only got planning permission for any sort of new stadium which has left us negotiating buyouts for the rest of the land we need, finalising plans for the structure and working on corporate deals. If you rush this process you end up like Arsenal did, with a stadium naming deal that lost you tens of millions because it was way below market value. The recession inevitably slowed us up too. You were actually very lucky with your build though as the value of the ground at Highbury enabled you to pay off the stadium at a much quicker rate than you needed to. The fact that you did shows where your owners were at in terms of ambition. Ask any investor, businesses that pay off their creditors early are not ambitious businesses. The reason for that is that the surplus money can be reinvested into the business at greater value to the company but if the shareholders are instead happy to hand over money early to save on interest they're not going to be able to expand. That's also reflected by your transfer policy and how much of the money they keep in the bank doing nothing. Basically with more ambitious owners you'd have much more chance of the club still winning trophies. Our owners are fairly cautious too but they're more shrewd than greedy. We opened our new £80mill training facilities at the beginning of the season which we've paid for whilst pretty much breaking even over the last few years(can't be bothered to look it up but it's probably about £10mill net profit over 4 years). If we had your owners they'd have £80mill extra in the bank but no new asset raising the value of the company in asset value and performance. Quite simply nothing Levy's ever done has ever suggested we'd sell players for short term funds, they're clearly waiting until they have a stadium project that funds itself and doesn't a huge initial investment from Lewis or the club. If we sold our best players we'll have a 55,000 seater stadium where we have to sell seats cheap because we're a midtable team. That won't make sense to Levy. Even if we sold Bale for £50mill, that deal's worth less to us than if he stayed for 10 years and got us into the CL just twice. As I said, Bale will be sold only if he really wants to leave and we get a good offer.
Actually it did. It had a direct and tangible impact on our abilities to both keep players and buy replacements. Wenger has come out in the last couple of weeks and spelled it out. He said that our financial restrictions were directly responsible for some of our transfer activity (or lack thereof). Flamini, Van Persie, Fabregas, Nasri and Clichy were all offered huge wages elsewhere that we couldn't match and coupled with our restrictions to buy in players of equal quality to match the talent of Henry, Vieira, Pires was another factor in why those players left. Our owners haven't been sitting on a cash pile like Dragons who don't want to spend it, they have been prudently paying off our debt, whilst building a pot of money that we can use to buy players, use for contingency and use to protect the club from falling into debt. Just because you have £50 in your pocket, it doesn't mean you have to go out and spend it all at once. It's not 'greed', it's financial pragmatism. And thank God we did it, because we're now in a position where we can spend money on the squad without risking going into huge debt to do so. If we'd followed the lead of Chelsea and City, we would have crippled ourselves. Make no mistake, if Levy wants to build a new stadium, the financial security of the club will come first, over and above keeping the players. If somebody comes in with a silly money offer for Bale, who let's not forget has already indicated that he may look to move from Spurs to play Champions League football, then an astute businessman like Levy is not going to turn it down. Especially in the face of the fact that he lost £1Om holding out for Modric, when a staggering £4Om was on the table. I don't think he would risk making the same mistake twice if it affected the long term plans for the club.
Piskie...it's the 2nd time you've claimed we lost £10m on the modric deal ... we turned down a £30m plus Alex deal (who they valued at £10m) and a year later we received £30m and a partnership deal with Real Madrid...that is NOT the same as losing £10m.
Your wage bill is enormous (£143m), so you could easily pay your top players more money. Munich's bill is lower, for example. Unfortunately for you it's largely taken up by splashing out vast sums to relatively mediocre players like Denilson, instead.
Actually if you take champions league revenue into account there is not that much of a difference between spurs and arsenal, our player get paid more because they constantly get us into the champions league, we essentially spend that money on the players. If spurs were in the champions league on a regular basis your wage bill would rocket as every time you renegotiate a contract players would want champion league wages.
As you can see, I haven't made a comparison between Spurs and Arsenal. I don't think that you can claim that Bayern Munich aren't a Champions League regular, can you?
Your comparing over different leagues, the EPL pays bigger wages in general bar a few clubs like braca and real. An average player gets paid more in England that they would in any other league in the world. In that case should arsenal and spurs have bigger wage bills than Celtic who can be regarded as a bigger club due the their history, support and semi regulars in the champions league?
The Bundesliga's easily comparable with the Premier League, in both terms of finance and football. The SPL isn't in either case.
Leaving aside the large boost that the Premier League has received this season, which would make that figure irrelevant to the available wage figures, Bundesliga clubs still have substantial revenues. Bayern earned significantly more than every side in this division bar Man Utd last season, for example, Shalke out-earned Spurs and Man City and both Dortmund and Hamburg are in the top 20 in the world.
Ok well we are going round in circles here, I am happy to admit that our wage bill is to high, but then so is every team in the EPL as everyone over pays for players that armt that good. The point in trying to make is that clubs such as Celtic and Ajax are at a huge disadvantage, but are as big as any EPL team bar Man U. Whereas you have used byern as an example to compare against arsenal, the only real way you can get a decent assessment is if you used the turnover to wages percentage, and I can't be bothered to look that up lol, its probably the only fair way to assess the whole wages debate, other than the fact the we all probably agree that footballers in the big league are grossly over paid.
It's about ratio to earnings though, Arsenal make more money so they can justify a bigger wage bill. I think we're fourth on wages, and we're averaging the same position in the league, so it's about right. On both counts we can justify spending more than Spurs. The difference is that we haven't spent anywhere near as much on transfers for the players that City, Chelsea and Utd have.
This for me is exactly the problem football has, spend the most and you win the most, somehow the powers that be have to create a more level playing field because football for all it's entertainment is ridiculously predictable. Any fan of NFL will tell you that in the same time there has been 5 prem lge winners there have been around 17 different Superbowl winners, and that's because they all operate by the same financial rules. I'd have much more respect for Chelsea and City had they achieved their successes through hard work and innovation rather than outmuscling the football world with the size of their cheques. Whether we/they like it or not, Tottenham and Arsenal are far more similar than you think...
Totally agree with that. It's pretty crass the way they have both literally bought success, but that's the reality of the situation as it stands. I'm not sure if NFL teams all operate on the same financial rules, but one idea I do like is their draft system, where the teams that finish lowest get first pick from the college draft. It's a totally different system in football, but I'd like to see something similar implemented. Although it would be a logistical nightmare to set up.
(I think The way American sports introduce players into the professional arena is why it wouldn't work over here, one draft can turn a teams fortunes. Indianapolis Colts were the worst NFL team last year, they draft the best college quarterback for years and are now a winning team who re guaranteed a place in this seasons play offs. Each NFL team have a maximum of $120m to spend on their playing staff which equates to approx £75M, NFL rosters consist of 53 players, compare that to the size of English squads and our total salaries paid. The point I'm making though is that no team can spend more than $120m a year, in fact there is a minimum spend as well. I think it's around $100m so that ensures you have competitive teams throughout the league which we clearly don't have/have never had in the premier lge. In short you cannot simply buy superbowls in the way you can buy league titles football
The NFL is not comparable because of the drafting system. Im not a big fan of NFL, but dont they have the college graduates going to the big teams at the end of college and every year the drafting process sees the lower placed teams getting first choice from the graduates, which means they get the chance to get the best young players. In football the richest clubs sign the young players, for example Messi moved to Barca at age 9 (I think). There is also some truth in what someone said in the likes of Denilson costing us too much, but I dont think its the transfer fees, its the wages of £50k+ for mediocre players that would only get £25k elsewhere. Our wage bill is full of players earning a large amount for very few if any appearances. In reality we need to offload the likes of Denilson, Bendtner, Sqillaci, etc but they want more in wages than anyone else would pay them so are hanging on and costing us.
