Transfer Rumours To sack or not to sack?

There's more than the 'usual chaos' ongoing at the moment. New CEO appointed, board members out,board members reassigned, new board members appointed, coach sacked, Chief Football Offier soon to follow, new DoF due to arrive...it's all change under the PL's best chairman...

Is any of it going to result in the club being run less like a market stall and more like a member of the Top 10 clubs in world football?

As usual...and despite all of the above repeating chaos, it's still all about COYS Daniel and until his cold dead hands are prised off the levers of power, we will continue to employ the wrong people, give them insuffiient resources and then sack them when they fail...while the architect of this recurring chaos faces no scrutiny and awards himself £3m bonuses.

 

I tend to agree with you. Monday at 9:00 I reckon, ****e Sports exclusive....

 

I suspect that there is even more going on than we are seeing! You're right though, he got his trophy wish now time to fall on the sword....

 

This is generally true in the modern game, but there tends to be a massive drop-off in revenue.
Taking La Liga from a few years ago as an example, this illustrates it:

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Two clubs absolutely miles ahead of the third and the third miles ahead of everyone else.
Barca and Real literally earning more than ten times Getafe are and seventy times that of some.

 

The dust is settling. It still feels a bit ****. Ange had aura, and the personality to really stand up to the narrative around the club, and to call some of the media out for what they are. Quite aside from Bilbao, I’ll always love him for that. He was what we needed in many ways - an old man of the game who himself was an outsider, a blend of the old and new schools, for better or worse - a figurehead for the club. Big Ange was big enough to dominate and own the story if he needed to.

Taking the emotion out of it though, which we shouldn’t always have to do with football but here we are, the league campaign was awful. There were times when it felt like I’d forgotten what it was like to see us win a game. The numbers don’t bear repeating but speak for themselves. It’s hardly surprising the club have made a change.

I suspect more will be written and analysed over the coming weeks as a successor beds in. Could Ange have managed his resources better, were his training and playing methods making the delicate injury situation worse? Maybe we’ll get a better feel for that. But it’s also hard not to think that the squad was undercooked in terms of strength in depth. Archie Gray, in his debut PL season at 18, played 4-5 different positions out of necessity. Some of the benches we had to put out were almost unrecognisable. We never had the balance across the squad that was needed. Ange’s game model may always have been doomed to fail in the PL, his management of the resources he had available may have left something to be desired, but it’s hard to think that he wasn’t also sold down the river a bit.

The new manager, who I assume will be Thomas Frank, has an enormous task. I suspect we’ll lose some important players this summer and on top of that he’ll be expected to get more out of the group that remains and I doubt we’ll see the kind of recruitment we’d be hoping for, even with CL money about to come in on top of likely making some good money off a few of our better players, and their wages coming off the books. He’ll also have to pick the group up from the inevitable emotional slump that will come from Ange being canned.

If it is Frank, I think he has more about him than people perhaps give him credit for. I’ve watched a few videos of him (there’s a good one on YouTube where they follow him around the Brentford training ground this season for a day). He’s a different personality from Ange, Scandi not Aussie, but I like the way he carries himself, I like how he talks about the game, and I think he’s a very good tactician. It’ll be a challenge as he steps up a level and has to do some real management in the truest sense of the word.

He’s going to have to show he has the fire to get the group going again and have them competing at the sharp end, and he’s going to have to show that (unlike Graham Potter) he can find the right blend of pragmatism and adaptability and dominance when you move to a club that is expected to dominate games more often.

It’s a big task. But it was for Ange, and it was for Pochettino. At least the trophy monkey is off the club’s back for the new man, whoever it is. At least we had Bilbao.

 

Because he picked up 78 points from our last 66 league games and we looked clueless.
The last time that we beat a non-relegated team in the Premier League was Man Utd in February.
We've not been improving, we've been getting worse.

 

Lots of players coming out in support of Ange and I don’t think we can really doubt that they wanted to play for him.

But is there a felling of ‘well if you’d have actually played better and not made so many individual errors, maybe we’d have got some more points, finished mid table then with the cup win there wouldn’t even be a question of sacking Ange?’

 

I don't think that there's any doubt that a lot of the players like Postecoglou and it's easy to see why.
He's a charismatic bloke and we won a trophy with him as our manager.
He also seems to address character flaws with players and gets them to reflect on them.

I'm sure there's quite a few in the squad reflecting on their own contributions to his sacking.
There'll also be some that can take a step back and look at how poorly organised we were.
Most of them are internationals and will be able to contrast their experiences there.

 

Yeah the wording of the statement shows they didn’t believe he was the correct man to take the team into next season and tbh there wasn’t anything shown to say they’re wrong.

Interestingly the statement said the club and the board, usually Daniel Levy is mentioned by name.

 

https://not606.com/threads/the-way-forward-for-thfc.405612

< discuss >

 

Serie A :

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which looks like a logarithmic relation (in contrast to La Liga - which is very Pareto) .

 

to be fair, the were all giving him pelters before he won the europy league and got you CL football and had a more successful season than everyone bar liverpool in the league (in terms of outcomes).

no one has been critical of him toin the media since his achievement . The only people who thought he had to go are some supporters for the turgid week in week out football that you had endur for the whole season but most have thought he needed a chance for a third season

 

I'm surprised to see Sassuolo so high, but it's much tighter in general, as you suggest.
The top 7 in revenue made up the top 8 in the league this season, plus Lazio.
The fascists seem like an odd omission from the revenue list too, in my opinion.

 

A cursory search says Lazio are E150m odd.
Which would put them where Verona are shown.

 

PL stuff :

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Linear for the usual suspects, then near-linear for the rest.

 

Two questions.

How many times has has a Frank team beaten an Ange team?

When Ange finished 5th in the league last season, where did Frank finish?

I like Frank, and I think he's a sensible choice, if you haven't won anything. He's less of a maverick, less box office. A slightly less charismatic and attacking and aggressive Pochettino. He probably has the more balanced and calm characteristics than either, he won't kick out in press conferences, and he is very astute tactically. Sensible.

Unlike some on here, I think there is lots to disagree with in the club statement.

I think Levy and the board are being disingenuous when they say "We cannot base our decision on emotions", when they are giving the manager a bunch of kids to build a squad with because they feel like they are good enough to compete on all fronts.

"It is crucial that we are able to compete on multiple fronts and believe a change of approach will give us the strongest chance for the coming season and beyond."

More questions.

What are they basing this on if not emotions? What does 'compete' even mean in this sentence? Is our squad as strong, deep or good as any of the top 6 teams? If giving us the strongest chance was really the goal, and crucial, we'd have more experienced players in the squad and better cover for key positions as a given.


Does this "change of approach" also include them buying better more experienced players to go with the kids, and actually backing the manager? Or are you going to expect Frank, who whomever the sorry idiot is who comes in, to pull a rabbit out of the hat and ask him to cook gourmet food with no spices in the rack, and Tesco basic ingredients.

Last question. Why am I finding myself in agreement with this guy twice in the same year?

 

There's a piece in the Times which feels like the apocrypha for the Club Statement

Here's the relevant snippets, because paywall

And **** knows why the indenting option causes sections to repeat...

Snippet 1

Everyone wanted a piece of Ange Postecoglou at the end, which was a mark of the impression he made. The players would not let him leave after the final game of the season against Brighton & Hove Albion, as Dominic Solanke pulled him back for one last photo with his family. The fans sang his name and one journalist shook his hand. Staff had collected memorabilia from the Europa League final — ticker tape, team sheets, names on doors — and asked Postecoglou to sign them.

Before the final, Levy’s mind was made up. He consulted senior players and the club sounded out Thomas Frank at Brentford and Bournemouth’s Andoni Iraola. Yet even Levy was swayed by the celebrations. He was still teetering before that 4-1 defeat by Brighton, and it took another 12 days before the announcement finally came.

it was not only the results. When the pressure mounted, the club were unimpressed by Postecoglou’s antics and believed certain players checked out. There were concerns about attention to detail and fears that the injury situation that derailed his first two seasons could, with the added strain of the Champions League, be repeated in a third.

Others made a connection between his high-intensity methods and the high number of muscle injuries. Medical experts estimate that about half the hamstring strains are linked to sprinting, and Tottenham were posting unusually large numbers for both. This season, ten Spurs players suffered hamstring injuries and in February, at the height of their injury crisis, 39 per cent of their injuries had been hamstring related, compared to the league average of 23.5 per cent. Tottenham were the top team for sprints (4,200) in the Premier League.

Even with nine men against Chelsea in November 2023, Postecoglou refused to adjust. “It’s who we are mate,” he said afterwards, while at half-time, according to one source in the dressing room, he told the players: “Even if there’s five or six of you out there, you don’t stop running.”

Those ideas grated with medical staff, who warned Postecoglou early in his first season the data for sprint and high-intensity distances in training was too high. Postecoglou insisted the players needed to endure to adapt. Staff were dismayed when he ignored advice around how long players should stay on in games, particularly those returning from injuries. They told him the risk rate of recurrence for a hamstring injury doubles after an hour but Van de Ven played 79 minutes against Chelsea last December, before going off with another hamstring tear.

insiders at Tottenham felt Postecoglou gambled too often and leaned too heavily on players’ opinions, which led to overly optimistic judgments around recovery times.
​

Snippet 2

In the big moments, his messages landed with the players, who found his pre-match speeches were like nothing they had experienced before. Postecoglou understood the importance of narrative — he walked around the training ground reading newspaper articles on his phone

Yet Postecoglou was often too outspoken and the club grew weary of some of the needless confrontations. He risked revolt when he cupped his ear at the Tottenham supporters, goading them after they booed his introduction of Pape Matar Sarr, who came on and thought he had scored against Chelsea in April. He argued with fans after defeats away to Bournemouth in December and Fulham in March, the latter coming just before the international break, when Spurs began discussing possible replacements and enquired about Roberto de Zerbi at Marseille.

Yet Postecoglou was often too outspoken and the club grew weary of some of the needless confrontations. He risked revolt when he cupped his ear at the Tottenham supporters, goading them after they booed his introduction of Pape Matar Sarr, who came on and thought he had scored against Chelsea in April. He argued with fans after defeats away to Bournemouth in December and Fulham in March, the latter coming just before the international break, when Spurs began discussing possible replacements and enquired about Roberto de Zerbi at Marseille.

None of it should have been a surprise. When Brighton considered Postecoglou to replace Graham Potter in 2022, they researched his character and saw the more belligerent side of his personality as a red flag. Brighton predicted trouble given the scrutiny would be even more intense in the Premier League.

And while Postecoglou always had an explanation ready for a defeat or bad run, the contradictions caught up with him. He said the players would “adjust” physically to his methods, but in his second season the injuries were worse than ever. He said his high-risk approach would never change, but success in the Europa League owed more to the Ange-wall than Ange-ball. Why was that pragmatism embraced in Europe but ignored to his cost in the Premier League? He warned against the idea of one trophy being a “holy grail” for Tottenham but before the final said winning in Bilbao could be a definitive moment. He said he loved the tough times when his methods were questioned but when those questions came in the aftermath of defeats, he regularly refused to answer them.
Some players lost trust in Postecoglou’s judgment on injuries and in the final weeks, one or two seemed to come and go as they pleased.

Tottenham spent nearly £400million across Postecoglou’s two years, which was the fourth-highest in the league, and replaced Kane with the £60million Solanke. But the spend on wages is still modest and moves in January were slow, when a threadbare squad desperately needed reinforcements. Last summer, the club swerved some more expensive targets, including Conor Gallagher and Eberechi Eze, who could have made all the difference. Crucially, Tottenham underestimated the physical implications of Postecoglou’s methods. They failed to give him the depth his style of play would need.

The Europa League triumph may have been the end for Postecoglou but it could be a start for Tottenham. That was the angle of the last question, before Postecoglou left through the exit door, a stadium security guard giving him an impromptu pat on the back as he went. “I love how it’s made people feel, that they now can proudly say their club is a trophy winner,” Postecoglou said. “That’s done, and I’m super proud of that.”
​

 

I know I sound like a broken record but look at Burkinshaw's first 4 seasons.
We won a major European trophy ... something we ain't done since 1984.
41 years of no European trophy and 17 yrs of no trophy and he's rewarded with the sack.
Maybe he wouldn't have pushed on but he and we deserved the opportunity to see

 

Times have changed. Virtually nobody survives relegation nowadays, for example.
Losing 22 out of 38 league games deserves the sack.

Some of our cup performances were ****ing awful, too.
Scraped past Coventry and deserved to lose. Got taken to extra-time by Tamworth.
Nearly blew a 3-0 lead against ****ty Man Utd. Lost to AZ.
Won the most important one, of course, but had to change his whole philosophy to do it.

I'd also point to our ridiculous injury situation, which he seemed to recognise was his fault.
We can't keep sacrificing our players' health to an unsustainable system.
It's the main reason I'd go nowhere near Iraola.

 

Bored of it all already. Socials are just a stream of tributes from players, everyone and their dog pretending they were Ange in and hadn’t given him dog’s abuse all season and the same couple of managers going round the rumour mill depending which bullshit you read.