There is a strong argument that it was this very model that allowed us to rapidly climb the league and punch above our weight. The years between selling Walker and last summer when we sold Kane saw us decline on average year on year. The two are almost certainly linked. We don't quite have the money to compete with clubs that cheat in open bidding wars. Selling in order to buy served us well for many years until we got our fingers burned from the Bale deal and basically stopped doing it at all. The result was we kept lots of players well beyond the time it was right to sell them and ended up making nothing for them (Dele, Dier, Eriksen etc.) and also never quite had the money to compete for better players, which is how we got stuck with B-grade rip offs like Lo Celso and Ndombele. I'd be all for it if we basically acted like Brighton with an exponentially bigger budget. Bring in replacements in advance and then sell the senior player when the time and price is right. If that's the plan for Dragusin and Romero, I'm all for it. My point is we spent years acting like a huge club who didn't need to sell players in order to progress, when the truth was we didn't (and still don't) have that luxury. Selling Kane was painful, but if those funds allowed us to bring in Micky, Udogie, Gigi and Dragusin and overhaul our entire backline in the process, the bottom line is we took a hit in order to take a step forward, which our league position at the end of the season confirmed. We lost a better player to build a better team.
It's so weird that our fanbase want us to be another Dortmund...until we get to the point where we sell players, which is what allows Dortmund to be what they are as they sell the likes of Sancho, Dembele, Bellingham et al for fees exponentially greater than the chicken feed they paid for them Now obviously we want to be in a position to keep hold of a core of our team for much longer, and have the infrastructure to do so compared to Dortmund - but it does have to be said there's countless examples of Many-worlds interpretation where you do have to wonder, for example the summer where we had a £40m offer for Danny Rose was also the summer Andrew Robertson was available for £8m, and you have to wonder how the chips may have fallen if we had Robertson at LB and £32m in our pocket
I think fans would be ok with Spurs selling their best players for big money as long it can be seen as helping the club progress. Selling them for big money but then going backwards rightly annoys football fans.
You're right. The trick is to find the balance and it's a very fine line. It's as if Levy's ego was so bruised by Walker moving to City that we went to the opposite extreme and basically kept hold of players for the sake of keeping hold of them, just to tell people 'we're not a selling club'. But then again, teams like Dortmund and Ajax have been guilty of going too much to the opposite extreme, allowing themselves to be strip mined to the point that they fall a few rungs down the ladder as a result and go from overachieving to underachieving in the blink of an eye. So finding the right balance is crucial, but a big difference between us and teams like Brighton, Ajax and Dortmund is that both in theory and in practice, we shouldn't need to bat an eyelid if on occasion it becomes necessary to drop a £50-60m net spend because we couldn't find the replacements we wanted and needed to dip into the emergency fund to get other deals done in time before the season kicks off. Most other sell to buy teams don't have that luxury.
There will always be backlash, understandably. And when it goes wrong (cf. Baldini's Summer of Love after we sold Bale), it looks horrendous. And even when it goes right (Berbatov, Modric and Kane sales all fall in this category imo), the benefits usually aren't immediately obvious which requires patience...something a lot of fans don't have.
I don't think it was Walker leaving per se, more the pisstaking with the whispering campaigns for Rose and Dier For all the stick that other fans give Levy for digging his heels in, if a club's approach is above board he will be perfectly accommodating, for example Modric to Los Ladrones or Keane to Liverpool On the other hand if the club takes the piss, either by clearly tapping-up a player (i.e. Walker to the Mansourites), a very public attempt to unsettle the player (i.e. Bale to Los Ladrones, the Mansourites failed attempt with Kane) or you literally kidnap our player (i.e. Berbatov to Man Utd) he is going to make damn sure you regret it
Actually, Levy declared with Walker : If you want key players, and you are a PL club, be prepared to pay the Levy tax, and nearly all of it up front. It obviously worked, because Citeh whined from top to bottom about what awaited them( when their summer of Kane looked like becoming a balance sheet son of Sam) .
I don't see this a good thing. It's not a decision grounded in good business. It's grounded in ego and pride, which is precisely what held us back from more or less the day we sold Walker to the day we sold Kane. Acting under the pretence of being a huge club when we weren't one.
I think it was a combination of the two. The way Citeh went about it was a disgrace, but equally damaging was the slap in the face at being told by a key player at a time when we were still in with a big shout to win the league and the fa cup, and with a new stadium on the horizon, that he nevertheless saw City as the club for success. That must a been a hammer blow to Levy's pride and estimation of our progress. But our reaction was unhelpful. Keeping hold of players became a matter of pride and our transfer dealings started to resemble vendettas more than good business.
Very telling that Rodon leaves Spurs to join a championship side. Bizarre signing at the time as he wasn’t even one who looked like he had a high ceiling. With all that said, I wish him well at Leeds
Pay me what I ask, and nearly all of it up front, and you have the player. Citeh did it for Walker, but couldn't afford it for Kane (so much for being a "big club" ) . "It's not a decision grounded in good business. "It's grounded in ego and pride, which is precisely what held us back from more or less the day we sold Walker to the day we sold Kane." It is grounded in the fact that a club that is repeatedly asset-stripped en masse of its key players by definition never allows a "critical mass" to remain long enough to succeed.
City could have afforded it but didn't think he was worth that price. They have since been proved right by their decision to buy Haaland.
No, they couldn't. Which is why they could not shut their holes about it for the entire summer. "They have since been proved right by their decision to buy Haaland." And Levy has been proven right by getting from Munich 10m odd less than what the Citeh holes were spouting Kane was worth 2 yrs ago, and not selling to a PL top 4 rival.
Lockdown austerity surely had a big say in him being brought in, as Inter stuck firm to their valuation of Skriniar knowing that only the most monied clubs would be okay with paying the (IIRC) £35m non-negotiable asking price That being said, his value would have been higher last summer: he had a respectable World Cup (albeit in the middle of the season...) and certainly did alright on loan at Rennes, though getting dropped for a dozen games heading into the business end of the season probably scuppered any chance of him being on lists of anyone but teams in the bottom third of the PL
I agree with RBDB. IMHO Kane is nearly as good an out and out striker as Haaland, and a lot better at everything else. He is a unique combo of 9, 10 and creative midfielder and would have been amazing at Citeh.
