Late last year Boss reckoned that I could be Levy's son based on my views so I thought I'd write down what I would do if I was Levy. The ultimate aim of a football club is to win trophies. Fortunately this is entirely in the interests of the owners, since, other things being equal, winning trophies brings in money and fans and increases the value of the club. Clubs are not created equal and gaps are created which are hard to bridge, because generally clubs with more resources will perform better. This means that improving performance is a huge problem because generally the odds are against you. Fortunately a lot of clubs are badly run, pissing money away on very short-term gains, so gradually whittling away at the gaps by running the club well has some chance of success. There are potentially six ways to grow the club's resources faster than the competition: 1) Player trading: buy established players for less than they are worth and sell players for more than they are worth. 2) Develop young players: Sign unknown 17-22 year olds and make more of them into stars than other clubs 3) Youth: develop your own young players to be better than other clubs 4) Coaching: get more out of your players by improving them and/or identify better tactics to get the best out of them 5) Health and fitness: make your players better prepared by improving their diets, training regimes and decision making; 6) Marketing: improve the commercial base of the club via attracting additional fans and sponsors (including making sure the stadium is the right size and quality Everyone else is likely to be trying to do the same so this is not going to be easy, but if we were towards the top in all of these areas we would undoubtedly close the gaps in the long run. They also all cost money so someone needs to have an overview of the way the money is allocated between them. Finally they need different skills - so you need a team approach. They overlap and possibly even contradict a bit - for example the coach might have a missing type of player in his squad and fixing that might be urgent and if all the players available are 'over-priced' we might need to throw 1) out of the window temporarily. Personally I don't think anyone has a real advantage in 1) in the long run and mistakes in 1) can be very expensive. So I would concentrate more on 2). I don't see the advantage in having a 'manager' responsible for most of the above because I think the Chairman should co-ordinate the six areas and set priorities because this is a money allocation issue. To use the titles that are in common use my team would be; 1) Director of Football - should know the value of all players and buy and sell accordingly 2) Chief scout - should identify young emerging talent 3) Youth team manager - should bring the youth through 4) Head coach - gets the best out of the players and selects the team 5) Trainer/chief medical officer - defines the fitness, nutrition and general training regime 6) Commercial director - raises money It seems to me our record recently is: 1) Only been average (for every Modric there is a Bentley). 2) We've been good at 3) We've been way off the pace here but things are looking up 4) Finally got someone who can do this 5) No idea about how good we are here 6) Slow progress
Win the FA cup. You have a good squad but how many have won anything? Wasn't the last time you won something when you had Berbatov?
Vertonghen, Lloris and Adebayor have all won stuff recently albeit without us It's definitely about time we won something though.
Slow progress is the right way to go rather than be fantastically successful straight away and then fade. I can only agree with everything you've written there Power. I hope we continue to make slow progress because that way we'll get there in the end with fuel to spare.
Nobody stands out as a bargain. Willian or Moutinho would improve us if they can be got for a sensible price.
Thanks for a thoughtful article, PS. I have to say I think that over the last few years Spurs have done a superb job with 1. Trading (in a sense) Modric for Dembele, Vertonghen and Dempsey (or most of Dempsey?) is one way for the club to keep moving forward. The deals for Adebayor and VDV were good last year as well. Jenas and Bentley were a few years ago. A related issue is the worth of the club. ENIC's game plan is to sell the club for much more than they bought it for. It's going very well, and as long as it does, the club becomes bigger, at least by some definitions. I have trouble IDing what I would do differently. The obvious moves towards making the club bigger are being done, I think, intelligently. The big logistical feat to tackle is a new stadium, the big club issue is whether AVB continues to look like a stable manager we can build around. The one thing you can make a case for is to have spent 10-40 million this year and in the last two on the player(s) who makes the difference for a CL spot. If we spend 35 million on a striker now, and make the top four, we'd be in better shape than not, and not.
