As we know, money is everything in top level club football these days - and for the big clubs there is so much of it. Spurs have the 6th highest turnover in the PL with £181M, but Liverpool (5th highest) have £256M whereas Newcastle (7th highest) have £130M. Other bigger clubs like Everton, Villa, Soton, Sunderland and Swansea are just above or below £100M. So Spurs are marooned in this middle ground where the club can't compete with the rich clubs to pay transfer fees and wages for the top players, but still have substantial funds to outbid other clubs for the best of the rest. In European terms, Spurs are comfortably better off than many teams who regularly qualify for the CL - and are inside the top 20 of all the richest clubs. Therefore the problem for Levy is that he has to look at the best players available who are not on the radar of the top clubs. Yet the selling clubs know Spurs are wealthy club and can pay top dollar and the asking price is inflated accordingly (look at the Soldado and Lamela deals). This has been compounded by Spurs being cash rich for the sales of Bale and Modric. PL clubs can afford to be stubborn and set the fee sky high (no pun intended) so Spurs will usually look abroad for emerging talent in other leagues. It's better to buy younger players with promise because they might improve and even if they don't, they will have a re-sale value. Accordingly, the players bought represent something of a gamble. It's not like Chelsea buying Matic, Fabregas and Costa and knowing exactly what they were going to get. Or even Utd spending big on Depay and Shaw because the risk of them failing is much less as they had already shown a high level of ability at a young age elsewhere. It seems to me that this "hit and miss" transfer policy relies very heavily on the judgement of those identifying the transfer targets. If, as appears to be the case at Spurs, the manager has only limited involvement, then there is a problem - especially when the manager is changed often and the new incumbent is left with a number of players he would not have chosen. The solution perhaps is to persist with one manager and make him more involved in the transfer process, alongside someone (whether it's a DoF, Chief Executive, director or whoever) who is skilled at negotiating deals when players have been identified. SAF and Gill was the perfect combination for Utd; transfer activity suddenly became farcical when it was Moyes and Woodward - but Utd have money to rectify even expensive mistakes so the analogy is not a good one.
Superbly put Luke. I hadn't realised that the gap between ourselves and the big fish was quite so big. The era from 1992-2005 did an immense amount of harm to the club's image and brand worldwide. It's only recently that we've seen signs of recovery from that financial slump. I would contend your point somewhat and argue that in the modern game, very very few teams display a coherent and consistent recruitment strategy. Perhaps only Southampton and Swansea of the mid-table-upwards region are examples of this, with Stoke a close 3rd. And there's the root of the problem: we take risks like a top 5 club but financially we're clearly closer to the 3 teams mentioned above than those who we finish deceptively close to every single year. I don't think you can argue that the transfer policies of United, Liverpool, Chelsea, City and Arsenal have been almost if not equally as bizarre as our own over the past few years. We could name multiple £20m+ examples from each of those clubs who haven't remotely lived up to their price tags. The difference is that Chelsea can sign a Cuadrado, City can sign a Negredo, Arsenal can sign an Ozil, Liverpool can sign a Markovic, you can sign a Di Maria...and no one bats an eyelid because the financial clout of those clubs is such that the mistake will be swiftly rectified. Our transfer dealings remind me of the In Betweeners trying to 'fit in' at a house party full of cool people. We walk the walk and talk the talk but the bottom line is we're like a kid in Toys r Us with the sort of money we got for Bale. Absolutely no clue how or when to invest it, when to stick or when to twist. We just keep running round and round in circles hoping we won't run out of room in the trolley before Dale Winton closes the shop.
On a hopefully slightly more positive note, some random bloke on Twitter called Paul Kramer (no, me neither) claims to have just got back from Spurs Lodge and bumped into a player having a medical, ending the tweet with the cryptic message (5,8). Which handily corresponds to Saido Berahino...
I love ITK posts! Let's hope this isn't the usual bullshit from someone capitalizing on Berahino's absence from the WBA squad, today.
I hope so too we could do with some good news. Edit: Kramer has struck again, according to this omniscient ITK the Spurs shop has placed a bulk order for 3000 no. 9 shirt transfers! I bet he's screwing with us all
I'm assuming that the esteemed Mr. Kramer merely made a simple error. After all, how could Paul Kramer (for it is he) possible be getting this wrong?
I usually find myself nodding my head when I read your posts, but not parts of this one. I think you make too much of the bad buying and too little of the good. No one has a crystal ball. Everyone who has tried to replace one big star with a bunch of players has ended up with poor results. The problem is trying to replace one big star with a bunch of players much more than which players you happen to pick. The sensible thing, which the fans would never stand for, is to buy up youth players, pick a well chosen veteran or three, and tell the fans this is the best thing for the club in the long run. I do agree about managers. Too much twisting and not enough sticking. Continuity is your friend. Funny we keep failing to catch the club that’s kept the same manager. While I don’t believe we can reach top four this year, especially given a putrid start, I’ll quibble to say that it’s normally a lot closer run thing than people tend to assume. If we had had a leader last year who could have gotten us focussed on the Liverpool game, if Balotelli hadn’t picked that game to get his one goal, if Man U had been healthy and continued to look discombobulated...an awful lot of things could have resulted in us sneaking a top four spot last year. They just happened not to happen. Don’t get me wrong. It ain’t gonna happen this year, and very likely not in the foreseeable future. But last year in retrospect was surprisingly doable. And you never know. Chance plays more of a role than most people think, I think.
The chances of our second team turning out to be better than our first are decent, as far as us having a paper thin squad goes. I sort of agree about Eriksen, though. Two of our four best players missing chunks of our season hasn’t helped us. (Rose being the fourth). I’m on record saying we’ll have more points than last year. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Of course, I’ve been wrong before. Or so people who fail to understand my genius claim.
I appreciate where you're coming from but surely you'd agree that our transfer strategy over the past 4-5 years has been utterly farcical? Yes, a tremendous part of that may be more down to constantly changing managers and hiring a DOF with zero prior experience of the PL beast, but isn't it worrying - perhaps from an egocentric place - that since Modric and Bale, we haven't managed to unearth a single player who has significantly improved our team. Granted, VDV is another exception but then again - we didn't exactly 'unearth' him did we? I dunno - I see Gomis just scored his 3 goal in as many matches. Mahrez is another player really kicking on this season (I have both in my fantasy team). Then I look at us as for bigger fees and wages I see Dempsey, Dembele, Paulinho, Capoue, Chiriches I mean the list is endless! It comes from a place of pride but if our most successful signing of the past four seasons or seven transfer windows is Eriksen then that's pretty poor as far as I'm concerned as he hasn't - yet - improved the club significantly. His quality keeps us treading water, nothing more. Same can be said for Hugo. Maybe I have unrealistic expectations when it comes to these things but it riles me that the likes of Stoke, Swansea, Souhampton, Leicester etc can pull of coup after coup in the transfer market for players that are surely within our budget range. While we're left with that years stocking fillers and kinder egg toys. Wasn't there a time - however briefly (probably under Arnesen) - that we were just so much smarter in our dealings? If Berahino and Illaramendi come in by next week, I'll retract that statement word for word. But right now I see nothing to suggest that anything has changed. And no, to my mind Toby and Kieran don't count as 'significant improvements' as they were brought in to rectify widespread mistakes in recruiting for a defensive line that for some reason saw the arrivals of Chiriches, Fazio and Vertonghen to replace the likes of King, Dawson and Kaboul. I guess that's the second part of my point - our strategy has been so haphazard over the past few years that it's almost a vicious cycle of one step forward, two steps back.
Our ability to sign decent players stopped on the day we sacked our Director of Football but that doesn't stop everyone arguing that such a role is unnecesary or even harrmful.
Pulis' post match comments are worth listening to. He quite openly admits that Berahino has been unsettled by everything that's going on. I was also very pleased to hear that he considers him a top lad who won't give you any trouble. I hope this means that Saido has grown out of the childish phase he had a couple of years back. He also contradicts himself by arguing that on the one hand the window should shut before the season kicks off, yet within a minute of that he's asked 'do you expect to be busy between now and next week?' To which he basically says 'yes I certainly hope so as it's become clear that there are key areas that need strengthening'...I.e through not closing the window before the season starts we are now able to address those areas that have become clear. Haha.
You mean like the "decent players" signed by Comolli & Baldini? Most of these "decent players" we've just got shot of, and the others, like Lamela, were saddled with unless we want to take another big hit.
I meant players like Carrick, Berbatov, Modric and Bale all of whom were signed when we had a DoF. I'd like to see any similar examples before or after.
Either that or we're signing a player who's 5'8" - the front runners would be Shinji Kagawa, Andrei Arshavin, or digging up George Best.
Every player we have was signed under a DOF. Either Comolli or Baldini. The vast majority of those signed under Baldini have been abject failures. As to Comolli, there is much dispute as to who he was responsible for and who he wasn't. To me, the fact that he was fired both by us, and by Liverpool says it all!
