Poch was generally against the loan system. It was one of his few glaring weak points, made more bizarre by the fact that his first cohort of players was built around the likes of Rose, Kane, Mason and Townsend - all of whom benefited from the loan system. We made the same mistake with Foyth and Skipp. I reckon the latter would be PL ready by now had he gone out on loan rather than hanging around the senior squad for 2 years.
It’s interesting you say this as I was considering making a thread to see people’s opinions to provoke some thought about some of Poch’s management. Might still do it in a bit, board’s been pretty quiet lately, trying to think of new **** to chat about, otherwise I’ll just play the villain card and make a “how poor is Winks on a scale of 1-10” thread which would go down well...
The club as a whole failed on this front. More so when the academy pipeline had started to deliver players into the senior squad starting 2011-12. Now, during the Pochettino era how much of said failings can be laid at the feet of the man himself, is up for debate. Perhaps someone more ITK such as Spurcat can give us some insights into what really happened.
It was quite well documented though that Poch preferred keeping his best talents around the first team rather than loaning them out. That would've been fine if they'd played a decent amount but neither Skipp or KWP who'd been the closest to the first team after the original Kane batch were getting anywhere near a substantial amount of minutes to aid their development. Then there's also the likes of Edwards, Madueke (these two especially), Griffiths, Bennetts and Binks who all left due to feeling they'd get better development elsewhere, we knew about the apparent attitude issues with Edwards but he said himself in an interview after leaving that he felt that label stuck longer than it should have and that he'd matured. So things didn't quite add up when we were being labelled as a club who gave chances to youth yet were losing a number of our best prospects. Edwards and Madueke are likely to get big money moves in the next 12 months I'd imagine, we have a sell on clause in the Edwards deal, unsure about Madueke, frustrating though as these could've very well followed Kane and co in the first team setup.
Levy and McDermott must have bought into the policy but it definitely seemed to come from Poch. Long before he left, most people on here thought that it was a mistake and the restoration of the loan process is good to see, We've got some really interesting talent coming through again.
I think that's probably quite natural to go along with the manager's ideology, especially as Poch done a lot more right than wrong in his time at the club. It's only now in hindsight that we can truly analyse on areas Poch really messed up. I think along with KWP, we'll come to rue not doing more to keep Edwards and Madueke. Edwards has been great in Portugal but Madueke has really started to come alive in the Eredivisie and doing it at a club like PSV, he'll surely have a lot of watchers from big clubs. I'm hoping that at least like Edwards we have a sell on clause in his contract because he's potentially a year or two away from a £30m+ bid if he keeps up his form.
Bundesliga Rando Watch The fact he looks like somebody shoved Winks and Lamela into a teleporter says...well, mainly it says I'm overusing that comparison at this point, although it seems to be somewhat justified as he plays deep and pings the ball around but is also a card magnet as his Bundesliga stats this season are 3 goals, 4 assists, 6 bookings, so he seems to play like a combination of the two of them as well, especially when you see he pulls the sort of passes Winks used to do when we created space around him rather than the tactics we've used for the last 2-3 years of making sure there's at least three opposition players around him for 60+ minutes That being said, with Bayern sniffing around, it's unlikely even if we do cough up the €45m release clause
Since Walker-Peters seems to be doing fine at Southampton it seems a bit of a stretch to say we spoilt him in any way. He should have just been picked most weeks once Trippier left.
I think if he'd been sent out on loan for the previous two seasons that probably would've happened. I'd say we definitely spoilt/ halted his development though because he could be first choice RB at a top six club right now had he had more experience behind him where he could've sharpened his ability (like how he has at Saints the last 12 months). Our management of youth in general was really poor under Poch though. Our failure with KWP, along with the poor management of Skipp until this season likely caused some of the younger ones to leave. Madueke himself was quoted as saying he never saw a route into the first team at Spurs, considering he was regarded as one of our best prospects in years, that doesn't look good from our perspective that someone with high hopes didn't see a future here. KWP, Edwards and Madueke's combined market values right now would probably be around £80m. We're producing the right talent but we're not developing it well enough. Thankfully this season Jose has seemingly allowed a number of loans and I think that will pay dividends in time. Most of our young players who have either gone on to be first team players or sold for nice profits benefited from going out on loan.
please log in to view this image please log in to view this image please log in to view this image It's telling that he's dropped a division since the weekend
If Edwards does get a big money move at some time in the future, I don't think it's worth getting upset about. Look at all the prospects Chelski have discarded, who later went on for huge money moves. Anything we have done is on a completely different scale to them.
What Chelsea do is irrelevant to us though, they won’t regret losing prospects as they’re bankrolled by a sugar daddy who can just buy them the most shiny thing on the market. We can’t do that and at times we’ve relied on promoting youth or buying young to help us go forward. We’ve lost three very good prospects in the last couple years (as well as other good ones) whose market values right now are soaring yet we lost/ sold them for peanuts, that can hurt a club like us far more than Chelsea. Plus, considering how ineffective our right side has been in the last couple years, it’s annoying to think that with better management by Poch and co, we may have been able to recruit within and improve on RB and RW to what we have right now. I think if given the chance, many would happily swap KWP for either of our RBs as well as Edwards and Madueke for Lucas and Lamela.
It has to be said that to date Spurs have not messed up on academy talent exiting and then being decent/stellar elsewhere. The issue is that the supply line has not recently been producing sufficient numbers of so-so squad players who can help the cause for at least two seasons before somebody better comes along to usurp them. Which affects the HG stuff at the minimum.
We shouldn't and really can't replicate what Chelsea have done with their youth system, but we should learn from it. We were getting good value out of the loan system pre-Pochettino and we need to get back to that.
The thing is we were copying their approach to loans, by loaning out players we didn't think would make it so were trying to up their value before moving them on, for example Connor Ogilvie, Josh Onomah, Cameron Carter Vickers etc. The problem was that...well, let me just take a look at our U23 squad...yeah, I can't help but notice that Kazaiah Sterling, George Marsh and Shilow Tracey are still there and, until last week, so was Anthony Georgiou So the system was set up to maximise the pure profit of our U23 players who were never going to step up, yet it never managed to do that - and at the same time, the money it did make was on players who had a chance of breaking through such as Marcus Edwards, Noni Madueke, Alex Pritchard, Milos Veljkovic etc
Nile John and Marques Muir have signed their first professional contracts https://www.tottenhamhotspur.com/news/2021/january/academy-contract-update/ Nice of them to mention Max Robson and Isak Solberg also signed contracts in passing, because I don't recall those being announced before...
Lequipe are saying we’ve made an approach for Di Maria on a pre-contract for the summer. Very good player even if he will be 33 by the time we sign him. Though our record of keeping Argentinian attacking mids fit and injury free in recent years gives cause for concern, lol.