ok, so the title I gave them wasn’t quite correct, but regardless, shouldn’t we be hellbent on ensuring we produce as many in our own academy as possible (as well as acquiring from other academies), rather than waiting till we have to spend £65m on one who’s in his mid-late 20’s?
That would require the club having a sound plan and strategy in place, mate. We don't do that around here.
There is no question that the huge debt we incurred due to the new stadium was largely taken on through loans which will inevitably contain covenants to protect the creditors. PS has argued that these covenants limit us to £150m net spend per year on footballing-related costs. I'm not sure where PS got the specific number from as I've searched high and low and can't find it mentioned anywhere, which is typical for a delisted company where transparency is not required and information is drip-fed on a need-to-know basis), but it does seem relatively in line with our spending since the move and post-Covid: - 2022/23: £130m on transfers + appx. £12m on compensation to Conte. - 2023/24: £125m on transfers (probably lowered as a buffer due to lack of European football) - 2024/25: £100m on transfers (probably lowered as a buffer due to lack of CL football) So we're not really hitting the ceiling on transfer fees as it is, and 100% have plenty of space to increase our wage ceiling, which fell from £117m to £104m in the space of two years due to all of our high earners bar Son leaving. My argument is that we can easily afford to bring our wage ceiling up to £128m pa, which brings us on par with Liverpool and above two teams who are now outperforming us in the league, Villa and Newcastle. Imho, the reason we keep signing the likes of Solanke, Johnson and Richarlison is because they are the only players who a) would join a mess like Spurs, and b) fit within our wage ceiling. Right now 'a' isn't easily fixable. 'b' is. I'd like to see us fix it. I'd also like to see pigs fly.
Don't have time for that but here are the top 5 for 2024/25: And this illustrates my point. Once you're past Salah, Liverpool's next tranche of players are all within touching distance of what we'd pay them if they were at Spurs. What's weird about us isn't that a global superstar like Harry Kane was our highest earner, it was the paltry gap between his package and the rest of the squad. Bayern recognise this and paid him as such, even though the players right behind him are world class. He is the lead singer and is compensated as such. The gap between him and a club legend is enormous.
The conclusion I've come to is that we should raise the wage ceiling, and aim for the following pretty much every window: 2 x youngsters (ideally HG) from lower leagues for £20m each. 1 x superstar on huge wages for circa £80m. This keeps us well within PSR regs, will help balance the squad and hopefully end the practice of never actually adding any quality to it.
I've actually suggested exactly this on a few previous occasions and it is very similar to the @Citizen Kane. idea. Put up with about a third of the squad being club trained, keeping them as a default even if they are a little below desired standard and buy two £75m players each season. If we had done that as a policy our club trained players would likely now be Madueke, Walker-Peters, Carter-Vickers Skipp, Winks, Austin and Edwards with Ben Davies also being association trained. We wouldn't have bought Dragusin, Porro, Bissouma, Bentancur, Johnson or Richarlison so could have spent about £200m on 3 excellent players instead of those.
Tanganga's doing very well at Millwall, by all accounts. I was surprised when he joined them and there's already a number of clubs looking at him for the summer, apparently.
in general I agree. However, some of those types of player in the examples you list also make sense, too. There’s nothing wrong with only spending £30m on a foreign player, as long as it’s the right player. Paratici was that piece of the puzzle for us, and generally found us decent quality. the key thing here, is raising the wage ceiling as you and others have alluded to, and then having someone decent employed to make the acquisitions, thus assembling a squad which has a mix of all player types discussed.
The only issue is whether there actually is a wage ceiling or whether we are simply signing the best players who will agree to join us and paying them accordingly. I can't actually think of any player in the category of worth paying £300k a week and would actually have joined us...
We won't know unless we try. I highlighted Kane as an example of a player who was paid well below his market value in wages for many, many years, heaven forbid that precious ceiling got too high. Maybe he took the annual kick to the bollocks because he's 'one of our own', but his wages at Bayern and how they destroyed their own ceiling to accommodate him tells its own story. I can only think of one wage at Spurs whose ceiling seems to be raised with ease, year on year: Daniel Levy's.
I don't think we'll ever know as we never seem to try, even with £200k a week calibre players. I think our fans have accepted a level of mediocrity to make themselves believe such players wouldn't join because our board never show the ambition to go much higher.
Personally I find the money discussion kind of misses the point. 1. We all agree that the club should only spend what it can afford to. 2. We don't know the exact figures but £150m per season seems to be the ball park figure. 3. The healthy top percentage of income to spend on wages is supposed to be 60%-70% so there is scope for us to up our wage bill. My issue re money is that we have wasted hundreds of millions. I know nothing about European football so knew nothing about Lo Celso or Ndombele. But what kind of scouting was done re attitude, injury record etc. That was £100m wasted. The there was Sessengon at over £35m. Lots of us were against this signing as he was pretty meh, at best, in the Premier League for Fulham and that's exactly what he brought to spurs. Then there's the £60m on Richarlison which was always going to be a car crash of a signing. The there was Clarke and Rodon at £10m each. Then there was Matt Doherty at £16m and Regulion at £30m, Gil £30m and Royal at £25m. These are the out and out failures (either due to them being ****e or not being given a chance). That's 10 players in 6 years at a cost of £316m. Sessengon and Ndombele left on free transfers, while Lo Celso was sold for £5m. Royal was sold for £15m, Rodon and Clarke when for a total of £14m, Doherty went on a free, Gil is on his 4th loan and will be gone on a free next summer and there ain't a hope in hell that we'll get more than £30m back for Richarlison (and that's being optimistic). So far we got £34m back and if my (seriously) over optimistic hope of £30m for Richarlison happens we'll have a return of £64m...that's a loss of £252m on 10 players that contributed nothing to the club. This doesn't include paying over the odds for Solanke (never a £65m player), Wilson Oderbert £27m (injured since signing) and Johnson £53m (never a £50m plus player). That suggests that our scouting is awful and has been for the past 6 years. Our successes have been Bentencur, Kuluchevski, Sarr, Vicario, Romero, VDV, Gray, Bergvall, Spence, udogie, Hoejberg, Undecided are oderbert, Kinsky, Maddison, Solanke, Bissouma, porro, Johnson, veliz, Dragusin, phillips, Then There's Solomon and Fraser which were both meh but both were free transfers. So that makes 10 awful signings, 10 undecided (6 of who have been at the club for over a season and a half and one for a year split over 2 seasons) 2 mehs and 11 successes out of our last 33 signings since we arrived at the new ground. That's on Levy and those he employed to do our transfers. It's an incredible waste of resources. If we had taken this part of the football club as seriously as Fulham, Bournemouth, Brighton to name just three clubs we would be in a far better position. Sacking the manager before sorting out this issue is the equivalent of moving deckchairs on the Titanic.
please log in to view this image And that win was against Southampton, who are the worst team ever and sacked their manager shortly afterwards. Man Utd also sacked their manager and have been in a big transition, yet they've got more than double our points in that time.
The main problem with the club is that it is run appallingly. It doesn't matter so much how big your transfer kitty is, it's how hard you work and smartly you use it to progress the squad for the coach. We spend our money like a drunk buying presents on Christmas Eve, after the pubs shut. That comes from the owners' representative on the board. He could stop it anytime he wants...but it just keeps rolling along. No other club does this...and our shocking level of success (or more correctly, lack of it) shows why. Levy's never escaped his inner barrow boy, unfortunately he never will and we suffer the fallout. ENOUGH OF THIS ****!
Our inability or perhaps lack of willingness to sell players has been crippling. I've no idea how Arsenal can sell Alex Iwobi for £34m, Chelsea can sell Mason Mount for £60m, West Ham can sell Scamacca for £25m yet we can't shift a single unwanted player for more than a loan with an option to buy for a fiver. Heck, United have even found a taker for Antony and he is so bad he has his own meme page. I should add that there is more to it than incompetence. I'll post the link to a fascinating analysis I read a while back. Basically the long and short of it is it isn't always beneficial to just sell a player to the highest bidder unless that bidder offers more than whatever the remaining contract value is. This is a really important point that I've only recently begun to understand as I've delved down the Daniel rabbit hole of our finances. So take Ndombele for example. Signed for circa £65m on a 6-year contract with wages of circa £10m per year. This means for example in year 3 of his contract, it was worth 65 - (11.5x3) = £30.5m. So to show a profit for PSR, we'd need someone to bid higher than that amount. That was never going to happen. Even at the end of year 5, we'd need an offer higher than £11.5m to come in, in order to show a profit. In the event that those don't come in, it becomes better to send him out on loan and at least save on a chunk of his wages, rather than sell him for less than the value of his amortized contract, which shows up on the books as a loss. I've done a terrible job at explaining that but take a look here for more: https://www.reddit.com/r/coys/comments/1eg55yt/understanding_transfer_policy_through_the_lens_of/
I actually think that record on signings might well be average for the league or even slightly above. As I mentioned the other day, you have to invest well over twice the selling club's valuation of the player to get a transfer done.* Imagine how successful you would be buying anything else with that handicap. *The selling club has the option to keep the player and up his salary and contract length so that his fully paid up contract is just below their valuation. So you would expect them to want a transfer fee in excess of his current contract value. But you also need to give the player a better contract to move to you.
