Yeah I agree Nice is a bit of a weird move football-wise. Don’t get me wrong I’m sure he’ll be living in the nice locations (excuse the pun). But there’s definitely some parts of that city where I wouldn’t want to be at night. Marseille can be rough too.
Sorry, but no. We're run like Trotters Independent Traders. Whatever's going cheap on the market, Levy buys. BMJ didn't want Zokora or Bent. Poch didn't want Aurier or Lucas. Mourinho didn't want Bale or Rodon. It's ****ing nuts that we waste such huge sums of money on players that the manager DOESN'T WANT and HARDLY PLAYS. The only reason that we do this mad thing is Levy thinks that he knows better. It'd be laughable if it wasn't killing us. Get him away from football decisions and let the next chump have a chance....or in 18 months, we'll be doing this again.
I've only been France once and I can't even remember where it was, was some school trip to a nice little village for History Class. Never been a country that's appealed to me in terms of visiting, gone through it a couple times on trips to Belgium and Spain (latter a long arse coach journey lol) but other than that France and its cities and towns are well down my list of places to go.
Kante was seriously underpriced, because he had a release clause. They fumbled about a bit trying to replace him, but got it very right with Ndidi after a couple of failures. Maguire for £80m for a team that doesn't sit back much was just silly.
Spurs have an interesting attitude to incoming transfers sometimes. There seem to be players out there who ‘the club’ like - where ‘the club’ seems to be a euphemism for Levy, Hitchin and the Football Board deciding they’re a promising young player who should be bought, improved and sold regardless of whether they fit what the manager wants and squad needs at the time. Our current crop would seem to include Rodon, Regulion, Bergwijn. Bale is a slightly different case as he isn’t young and was/is only a loan but he was another who Levy was clearly obsessed with bringing in. Going back a bit I think you can look at Lucas too, not as young but a player we had apparently tracked for a while and saw an opportunity to get. I actually think of the ones we have now, Rodon has terrific potential under a manager who will play and develop him, Regulion showed a lot of class before his injury, and Bale’s numbers were actually pretty decent, albeit not against the top opposition. But the club need to cut this kind of activity out and focus on rebuilding the squad from the ground up. It’s fine to do this tinkering when the squad is in good shape but to focus on pet projects when the house is burning down is ridiculous.
I’ve always preferred France to Spain but yeah, Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands, Eastern Europe have always been more my vibe. I don’t do heat very well haha. So I go in the winter and freeze happily
The strategy of signing low and selling high was in full force during Arnesen's stint as DoF, which is why we were bringing in young English talents with potential upsides in Defoe, Dawson, Carrick, Huddlestone, Jenas et al as well as other young talents such as Reid, Ziegler, Halfredsson etc based on both longterm planning and also how, if there were bids for the players, there was the likelihood that one or two of them would be able to fund a rebuild The problem being that there's two occasions where we deviated from that strategy The first was under Baldini, where he chucked around money in such a way that the second part of the plan wouldn't happen because of our initial outlay (notably with Soldado, Lamela, and very nearly Paulinho) and the second was the summer of 2019 where we had Pini Zahavi on a retainer to handle deals and just so happened to spend £62m on a Pini Zahavi client that same window The former I place the blame firmly on Baldini as he ignored his brief entirely by bloating our wage bill and also making it impossible for any manager to integrate an entire midfield's worth of signings when we already had a midfield that wanted games, but the latter is a more difficult one because on the one hand the club losing their heads with transfer fees does come squarely down on them - but on the other, the fact we had a year of kvetching about not spending doubtless played a part in it as the club wanted to show aMbiShuN with their spending when the reality is that if we were a little more canny (okay, a lot more canny) we could've created a more balanced midfield instead of the porous mess that it's been since Dembele and Wanyama fell to bits
Longterm planning is the key phrase. With Bergwijn for example, no doubt a talent who has had a rocky time of it here. Perhaps the PL move came too soon for him. But I’m sure there’s a player in there somewhere. However I’m not sure what problem he was signed to solve in a squad that was already stacked with wingers and attacking midfielders. Yes we had injury problems at the time but that’s what the loan market is for.
Bergwijn went from being an attacking left-winger to being an auxiliary right-back, then got injured and couldn't get back into the team. Using him to relieve the pressure on Son and avoid burning him out would've been ideal and would work for both players.
I agree but then it comes back to planning. We have an unbalanced squad with too many players - especially non-HG - in attacking midfield and winger positions, and not enough quality at CB or CM. We shouldn’t be adding players where we’re already stocked just because they’re good players because that limits our ability to recruit where it matters.
I generally agree with that, but I think that our balance suffers from more than just a lack of quality in certain positions. There seems to be little thought put into how we're going to play and whether any signings will fit into that system or style. "Is he good?" and "Is he right for our club?" are not the same question, nor should they be treated as equivalent.
Completely agree. There are clearly some signings that are more thought through - Højbjerg being a good example, though he’s also suffered from a transition to pressing less and not having an ideal midfield partner - but a lot just seem to be a bit scattergun. Signing young players in the hope they’ll appreciate in value a bit and we can flip them in one or two seasons for a profit even if they haven’t cemented a first team place. It’s way more risky than it seems: 1. Our squad balance is precarious as it is because of the HG quota, which mean we should be prioritising key signings for non-HG spots rather than project players 2. There’s no guarantee players will appreciate in value 3. Though the hope in the medium term is that we profit on transfer fees, in the short term it denies us funds that could be put towards fixing serious squad issues in the starting XI
Bergwijn made sense at the time we signed him as he can be deployed on both wings, meaning he could be a reliable understudy for Lucas on the right (as Lamela seems to get injured every six weeks) and potentially his long-term replacement while also offering someone who can give Sonny a rest on the left And then we went and signed Bale this season, which bumped him down to the third-choice on the right, and with us flogging Sonny to death on the left he didn't have many opportunities there - and that's putting injuries or having zero confidence due to the one time he got a rare start it ended up with him getting racially abused by our own fans Better squad management would have given Bergwijn more games this season, and that's something we've been saying about quite a few players for a while, Rodon being another obvious example. Although it also has to be said that, at the time, it seemed his signing would mean wither Lucas or Lamela were going to leave last summer, and yet neither moved
Which I have never said...not once. There's no point. ENIC aren't going anywhere until... 1 Joe Lewis dies; or 2 some loony bids £1.5 billion; 3 they get the NFL franchise and some loony bids £3 billion. Until then, for better or worse, they own the club...but Levy can be manoeuvred out of running the football side of the business or sacked as an employee. Either will do for me...but NOTHING LESS.
In terms of squad management, the easiest way to break down how badly we ****ed it is to break it down like this This season we played a total of 58 games across all competitions, so realistically we needed to manage the squad so some players didn't get burned out while others got enough games to keep them sharp in case of the inevitable - yet we simply didn't do that, as a breakdown of the number of games players started demonstrates, and some of it is pretty damning 40+ starts Hugo Lloris - 48 Pierre Emil Hojbjerg - 47 Son Heung-min - 44 Harry Kane - 43 30+ starts Eric Dier - 39 Tanguy Ndombele - 35 Toby Alderweireld - 34 Sergio Reguilon - 32 Ben Davies - 31 Davinson Sanchez - 31 20+ starts Lucas Moura - 28 Harry Winks - 28 Serge Aurier - 26 Moussa Sissoko - 25 Steven Bergwijn - 20 10+ starts Gareth Bale - 19 Giovanni Lo Celso - 18 Dele Alli - 16 Erik Lamela - 13 Japhet Tanganga - 11 Carlos Vinicius - 10 Joe Hart - 10 <10 starts Joe Rodon - 9 Gedson Fernandes - 2 Harvey White - 1 Sub appearances only Alfie Devine Jack Clarke Dane Scarlett Nile John Alfie Whiteman Marcel Lavinier
I don’t think that’s too bad. Only 4 started more than 40 games and 1 is a keeper. Kane and Son are star players so needed to start most games. The only one really over used was Hojbjerg because he really lost form and looked poor towards the end of the season.
I think squad management was definitely Jose's downfall, it resulted in previous key performers like Son and Hojbjerg massively fading in the second half of the season and results ended up going with it. Underutilising Bale, amongst others was also criminal and costly. The style of football didn't help but I don't think there was much difference between him or Mason, Mason basically just picked Bale more often and was repaid with goals from the Welshman. The players in general are mainly why the football was poor in my opinion and that's largely because so many aren't good enough. Poch, Jose and Mason barely got a tune out of them for two and a half seasons, with Kane and Son just papering over the cracks. Going forwards though, being in the ECL, it's actually pretty ideal in the sense it'll allow the new manager to (hopefully) trim the squad considerably as youth players, younger first team players and one or two squad players will be the ones likely to feature heavily in the ECL. The likes of Kane (if here), Son, Hojbjerg, Lloris plus the managers' new signings for the first team won't really be needed until the knockout stages, assuming we qualify, which we damn well better.
It's minutes, too. If you click on the clock on the right of the columns, it'll order by the total of minutes played: https://www.transfermarkt.co.uk/tottenham-hotspur/leistungsdaten/verein/148/reldata/&2020/plus/1 Hojbjerg played every minute in the league and made an additional 15 appearances in the cups, plus 7 games for Denmark. 60 games in a season is too much, especially when he's playing the full 90 in the vast majority of those. He also barely missed any games for Southampton in the previous season. Kane, Son, Dier and Alderweireld had similar heavy workloads, all featuring consistently for their countries and too often for Spurs. Lloris can probably handle it as a goalkeeper, but there was no need for him to travel for European games he wasn't playing in. Players like Alli, Vinicius and Rodon are probably at the opposite end of that scale and were underused.
