You raise a good question. I've long been of the opinion that if no one genuinely good is available, save the money instead of spending it. Our transfer business since moving to the new stadium has been largely atrocious and it hinges on this point imo. Yes, we've raised the average amount we spend on players, but has the average overall quality increased? Absolutely not. Our rivals have shown that these days you need to be shopping in the £70-100m aisle to be almost guaranteed a player who will slot straight in and improve the team. We have never turned down that aisle. Instead, we shop where the likes of West Ham, Brighton, Palace and Villa shop, where the spread is £30-60m. Here, the risk is much greater but the problem we have that our fellow shoppers don't is that we often pay higher wages, which makes it impossible to get those failures off the books and they end up either leaving at a massive loss or wasting away their careers before leaving on a free. All of the following were signed within this bracket, none of them have been worth the money: Ndombele Lo Celso Richarlison Solanke Tel Johnson Simons That's £350m pretty much down the drain. £70m on one player is surely better than spending the same amount on Tel + Simons? So I say again: if the right player isn't available, save the money and give the youngsters a chance. If they come good, fantastic, if they don't, we have loads of money in the bank to fix the problem down the road. But once you've spent a chunk of money on a player, it is inevitable that the youngsters will be pushed down the pecking order and their development will stutter, all for the sake of a player who isn't actually any better than them.
We've totally lost our way. There's no coherent plan. Mostly, we buy players because of price, wages and if we think they're underpriced. Largely, the results speak for themselves. One can only hope that Levy's departure will see an end to this nonsense. The new regime say that they want success...well, that's going to take planning, time, hard work and considerable funding. Already, Bilbao seems a very log time ago.
There is no doubt that we were second best yesterday. That has not always been the case in this fixture and in the past we have justified complaints of being robbed, but not yesterday, we were poor. I suppose you can say that it is at least easy to see where we are lacking quality and that is in attack. That's not news to any Spurs fan, we can all see that. I think we have to realise that we have had an easy run so far and that explains our healthy goal difference and high league position. We are not staying up there, are we? On current form we will be lucky to make top 10. We need Solanki back for sure, but we won't see him before the end of November at the earliest. There are no easy games in the PL but the coming fixtures Man United, Arsenal, Paris, Fulham, Newcastle are formidable. By the looks of it, if Xavi is to come good it could be months away. Bergval is the better option, probably. I don't normally get involved in this sort of player comment but our attack is so poor. There is another issue and that's Brendan Johnson. He was our leading goalscorer last season and he has been sidelined this season. Surely we can't afford to ignore that when nobody has stepped up to replace his goals. Is the price of accepting the low level of the rest of his game worth paying for his goals, of course it is IF he can score them. Kolo may come good but right now I wonder if we should try and find a place to give Johnson a run of games.
Having more faith in our academy players may be part of the answer. Buy the better players that you suggest but fill the gaps with our own youngsters and hope some of them hit the mark. We did that with a certain H Kane and it paid dividends, now I except that Kane is a one off and we are unlikely to unearth anyone that good again. But I honestly don't think that Donley and Moore could have been less effective than Xavi and Odobert so far this season.
I agree with your financial assessment. I actually don't think we have enough good youngsters ready to compete at this level to even do what you suggest. This is why we've been acquiring kids like crazy in the last few windows, hoping to make up for the missteps of an underperforming academy. We appear stuck somewhere between trying to catch bargains, and aiming for top players that'll actually shift the needle. We've convinced ourselves that we are somehow 'above' or better than the teams you mention, but are we? Without Kane and Son, Dele and Eriksen before them, we are pretty average and punching above our weight. Who would play as an AM from our current roster of youngsters? We should have bought Eze and Olise when Palace did, for example, as we are not the big club that these players are going to want to come to after they become big players. We are clearly trying to rectify that now albeit a little late, and we don't like the risk that comes with that. Crystal Palace haven't been challenging the way they are recently, for Eze's entire growth chapter. Are we willing to accept a mid table existence to give some younger players the development time to become big? I hear you on the player list, but again, to be fair, do we win the EL without Richarlison and Johnson? Not sure. What if the manager comes in and says that the youngsters aren't good enough and calls for these reinforcements? Why do we assume Xavi is a Levy signing and not a Frank signing? Solanke would be a solid backup signing if he were fit. Simons is not up to speed with the league yet. Son came from the same league and didn't do too bad. He did have the luxury of entering a stronger team than the one we have now though. I'm curious to see how this all pans out over the next couple of seasons of Frank 'stability'. We can't blame Levy anymore. With two directors of football and arguably the most liked and trusted manager I the PL, we should begin to see movent in the right direction. No more hiding a comedy of errors behind the magic duo of Kane and Son. It's time to put up or shut up in the windows.
The problem is we'll never know as the youngsters never get a sustained run in the team, even coming off the bench. And then when we loan them, the loans tend to be poor decisions that don't help their development. Is Kinsky really that much better than Keeley? Is Tel really that much better than Moore? Is Odobert really that much better than Devine? I'm better than Richarlison, so I assume Lankshear, Scarlett and Donley are too. But there seems to be no path for their development. It is obstructed by expensive mistakes.
Part of the issue is that the hyperinflation of the transfer market has created the mindset of clubs having to go all-in on a player every single time, which wasn't the case even five years ago A decade ago clubs could respond to needing to find a specific player only to find limited availability and/or getting priced out by signing an inexpensive stopgap to cover that role for the season and come back the next summer, which we did with Benjamin Stambouli, who we flipped for a small profit the following year after moving Eric Dier up the pitch Yet these moves aren't inexpensive anymore, they're £15m a pop - and also make it a bugger to flip the players for anything resembling a profit, as our continued efforts to shift Manor Solomon demonstrate as £15m is still expensive to the sort of clubs we'd be trying to move them on to
I firmly believe we've contributed more than most clubs to the hyperinflation you're referring to. Man Utd and Chelsea probably the only clubs who've done more damage over the past 4-5 years in that regard.
Fantastic post. I agree, we do seem stuck between two minds. We try to act like we're not Villa, Brighton or Newcastle but then we very rarely spend more than them on players and have a relatively similar wage band since multiple big earners have moved on. I'm think it's clear from observing the likes of City and Liverpool in recent years (and ourselves under Poch) that youngsters thrive best when they enter the fray of an established, strong and consistent starting XI where they aren't the only hope in their position, are sharing it with a tried and tested senior player and develop accordingly with minutes off the bench and in the cups. Our problem in recent years is that the starting XI has had gaping holes all over it and this has created an impossible situation for youngsters. Some (Bergvall, Tel, Gray etc.) have had a huge burden thrust on them in a toxic environment. Others have been pushed down the pecking order in a panic as we rush to plug those XI gaps with literally whoever is available to placate the fans. And having mentioned that last point, I do think that Simons was more of a pressure signing than a club signing. We'd missed out on three targets, Semenyo, Savinho and Eze, and this combined with the manner of the latter's eventual fate stoked the fans into a fury and Levy did what he does best which is to panic and throw money (not too much, mind) at the first thing that moves. Far wiser is to stand firm, save the money and go again in January, meanwhile giving youngsters the chance to shine.
I think thay the free sub that the opposition get after after a concussion should happen within 5 minutes of the concussed player being replaced, At the moment a team can curry on using their five subs as normal and can use their bonus sub maje a break in play in the final minutes if they only have a 1 goal lead
We really haven't contributed to that hyperinflation The Mansourites and the Chavs basically created it during Lockdown, where they used their bottomless pits of money to solidify their positions while most other clubs were relatively gun-shy about spending big as they had no idea if or when fans would be back in the stands, and it exploded with the combination of Todd Bollo deciding that Uncle Roman hadn't done enough to destabilise the global transfer market coupled with Man Utd seemingly paying at least £10m over the odds for players on a pretty consistent basis To put it another way, Barca paying €105 for Ousmane Dembele was seen as a freakish fee back in 2017 - but Chelsea have paid more than that on three occasions in the past four years. Or for another example, the £55m we paid for Ndombele in 2019 isn't anywhere near the fifty highest fees paid for players, entirely because at least half of that list has been since 2021 - and since that time Man Utd have contributed Antony, Jadon Sancho, Benjamin Sesko, Rasmus Hojlund and Bryan Mbuemo to the list
One stat that's come up is that, in the league, we've attempted just four through balls all season, when the league average is 18.5 Really does point to an issue in the transition phase, given we don't really have any players who can move the ball 15-20 yards up the pitch with a single pass and haven't really had that since Modric left Also highlights why so many players seem isolated when Kudus gets doubled up on, because the likes of Xavi make runs but the pass never comes
