Winning isn't important to Spurs - they just care about money! - Juande Ramos

This is from the Daily Fail but a lot of quotes and tbh seems Ramos is just saying what a lot of us already think and know.

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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/fo...isnt-important-Tottenham-just-care-money.html

History is not always written by the winners - Juande Ramos is the only coach to have won anything at Tottenham in the last 15 years but he is remembered as the bumbling boss who was sacked after a year.

‘The stupid Spaniard who didn’t have a clue’ is how he feels the story was told. Now, as he prepares to bring his Dnipro side to White Hart Lane in the Europa League next month, he offers up another version of the events that ruined his reputation in England.

Spurs sacked Andre Villas-Boas, while Tim Sherwood has them just outside the Champions League places - but Ramos believes that is exactly where they will stay for as long as they sell established stars and replace them with young prospects.

‘Spurs sold Gareth Bale in the summer and with the €100million they have signed five or six players. They will see if any of those players take off and then maybe sell them on and reinvest: that’s the business plan,’ said Ramos at the Ukraine side’s winter training camp in Alicante.

‘It works well but you have to ask the question: what are you trying to achieve? Are you trying to win money or titles? The sporting side is the priority at Manchester United, Manchester City and Chelsea.

‘City sign Jesus Navas, Alvaro Negredo. They don’t look at the age of the player, they look at the performances. Spurs look at the age, thinking of a future sale.

‘I advised them to sign Luka Modric. He spent a couple of years developing and started performing well and they sold him.

‘Why aren’t Spurs going to win the league? Because they are always a small step below those three or four teams. Economically it works well but in sporting terms it needs a slight tuning. What are you chasing? Titles or economic success?’

And what if Spurs simply don’t have the budget to compete with the top clubs?

‘Then you don’t sack the manager for not always being in the top four,’ he said. ‘I didn’t have a problem with selling Berbatov, so long as someone came in to replace him.

‘The two strikers that I asked for were Samuel Eto’o and David Villa. But we were left with Darren Bent and Roman Pavlyuchenko.

‘We started the league and we couldn’t beat anyone; we couldn’t score a goal under a rainbow and in the eighth week I’m gone.’
Star man: When Dimitar Berbatov was sold to Manchester United, Ramos wanted certain replacements...

In 2008 Pep Guardiola’s arrival at Barcelona had put Eto’o’s future in doubt and Villa was on his way out of cash-strapped Valencia — but Tottenham chose Pavlyuchenko.

‘He came,’ remembered Ramos. ‘Russian — he didn’t understand anything. He was here for six months and he hardly played. Damien Comolli signed him.’

Ramos manages a smile when he recalls the tragi-comic nature of his only pre-season at Tottenham in which the striker he didn’t fancy - Bent - couldn’t stop scoring.

‘All the goals we got that pre-season, he scored! Hell! It’s the worst thing that could have happened.

‘We won every game and he scores 11 or 12 goals and so the chairman thinks, “This guy Berbatov out, this guy Robbie Keane out!”

‘And then what happens? In December they spent £51m to rectify the mistakes. They say, “It’s the manager who doesn’t understand. He doesn’t know anything. The stupid Spaniard hasn’t got a clue. We’ll blame him”.

‘The guy that sold Keane and Berbatov wasn’t to blame and yet they had to spend £51m to sort it out!’

Sporting director Comolli was sacked as well. ‘With hindsight it would probably have been better not to agree to work with Comolli,’ added Ramos. ‘The only honourable thing Levy did was that he knew Comolli had made the signings and so he sacked him, too.

‘If he had blamed the signings on me, Comolli would have carried on.’

So has Villas-Boas been the victim of similar errors this season?

‘You take Bale out after last season when he won eight or 10 games on his own and you start to struggle, of course,’ agreed Ramos, but he is happier talking about his own dismissal. ‘It’s not a case of defending myself. These are quantifiable facts. I should have resigned sooner when I saw what was happening.’

Bent’s pre-season form was accompanied by Berbatov’s refusal to play. Ramos said: ‘As a coach, what do you do? If he doesn’t want to play then he’s not going to play well. It’s actually more honourable to say “I don’t want to play” than to put the shirt on and go out there and not try. I understand the player. He wants to go to United.’

Not understanding the players was one of the main criticisms made about his short reign. But he said: ‘My relationship with the players was excellent in the main but you know who it was bad with? David Bentley. His agent was close to Levy. And as Bentley didn’t play, because we had Aaron Lennon, he started to dish the dirt.

‘He was the one who started to undermine the relationship. He started with, “He doesn’t understand”. But four months before, I had understood. Then they said they were hungry. But four months before, they weren’t hungry.’

Bentley and his agent strongly refute these allegations and have insisted that the player enjoyed working with the Spaniard.

But the players’ complaints about his crackdown on diet still riles Ramos. The five trophies won at Sevilla had been based in part on extreme fitness levels he tried to impose at Tottenham.

‘It was incredible,’ he said of the food made available to the squad.

‘It was like a wedding buffet. In a sportsman the physical condition has to be perfect because you live off your body. Your food is your fuel. If I eat a cake, I’m putting in diesel; an athlete needs to be putting in super fuel. There was some resistance of course — a lad who is 22, 23 years old, with cash in his pocket thinking, “And this guy’s coming here telling me what to eat”, we could see that.

‘We trained out in Chigwell and there is a McDonald’s and we would see them there, eating hamburgers and drinking Coca-Cola.

‘I couldn’t go to their houses to see what they were eating but if they were not at their ideal weight then I could keep them out of the side. And we recovered in the league, we beat Arsenal for the first time in (nine) years and we won the Carling Cup, all in four months. Everyone’s as happy as hell.’

There was an unhappy ending a few months later but Ramos says he is not down on the culture of English football. He speaks about the ‘scandalously good touch’ of Tom Huddlestone and how good Jonathan Woodgate and Ledley King would have been if not for their injuries.

And he disagrees that the average English footballer is less intelligent than his continental contemporary, saying: ‘It’s the flexibility they lack, not the intelligence. Changing things during a game is hard for them. All that kind of work is done with Spanish kids early on.’

But he doesn’t expect to be giving any footballing lessons when Dnipro meet Spurs. ‘One of their players is probably our budget for the entire season,’ he admitted.

‘Spurs are a team who are clearly superior to us. We’re light years away from them right now.’

And there is no lingering inside knowledge that can help him out. ‘Knowing about the opposition is not the same as being able to stop them,’ he said. ‘I can tell them how quick Lennon is and how he can take them on the outside. But then they can go out on to the pitch knowing that and, voom-voom, he’s gone. What are you going to do? Throw a rope around him?’

Ramos is perhaps, above all, an unlucky coach. When he won the League Cup with Spurs it was his sixth trophy in less than two years. He beat a club record for consecutive wins at Real Madrid only to be sacked by a new president.

What kind of welcome does he expect at White Hart Lane in March? ‘The best case scenario is some applause and a welcome back, I suppose,’ he said. ‘The memory should be a good one. I was the coach the last time they won a trophy after all.’

 

Many of us bury our heads in the sand and don't want to hear the truth, he may be a little bitter but all he says is true.
Our most successful manager this century , saying the team can hardly ever win anything under ENIC.
Throw in a egotistical nutter in, then goodnight Vienna .

 

A little bitter!? That's putting it mildly! Ramos IMO only joined us for a big wage so he loses any real credibility for moaning about working conditions or agreeing to work with comoli. Of course there are aspects where he has a point but anyone can attack Levy and our transfers as it's obvious how the club is run but Ramos wasn't cut out to manage here.

He had a decent spell at Seville, Was lucky to take on Jol's cup team , then made a complete mess of league form.

I notice he doesn't mention Redknapp, the man who fixed his mess. Why's that? Because he's highly bitter and only interested in using examples to bring pity on him.

Redknapp is the only manager who had any balls or was strong enough to challenge Levy. Managers like Ramos and AVB are bitter, dour and lack the personality to speak up for themselves until after they have been sacked.

 

I just said this on another thread but only a moron would think that Spurs had a hope in hell of signing Villa and Eto'o in their prime. Its just laughable.

 

Surely the whole point of ENIC's strategy is to gradually improve the team without having to bet the farm.

We were nowhere when they took over and are now regular challengers for top four: why is this so bad?

 

A business trying to make money? Those evil bastards! Football clubs being run as businesses might not the best thing for the fans but at least it's got some rules. If everyone got a mad owner with billions that they're throwing at the club then it becomes a case of who has the bigger wallet so if anything we're less likely to do well in that scenario because as a business we're above average in the Premier League.

I don't know if there's much worth believing in what he says. There are things in that article that we know are bollocks, like Levy wanting to sell Modric, Berbatov and Bale, so I don't see any reason to believe the rest of what he said is anything other than similarly misleading rants from a bitter man.

 

They don't improve the first team, this team is far inferior to the Harry side.
They constantly cause chaos by ripping the star players out of teams on the verge of actually winning things.
No manager can have success under such restrictions .
Their desire is for financial success not sporting.
A "Buy to sell policy" is a sporting disaster.
I can just remember a time when we won things , a long,long time ago before two sets of parasite "greed is good" Fat Cats took
our club over and drained it soulless.

 

"‘City sign Jesus Navas, Alvaro Negredo. They don’t look at the age of the player ..."

They don't have to look where the transfer/wage money is coming from either.

Criticism about PL player self-control (diets etc) is fine.
Criticism about ENIC not turning the vicious circle into the so near but so far virtuous circle is fine.

Everything else just seems a bit too bitter IMHO.

But VERY telling that in these days of Ade and BAE, he has a story about Bentley.

 

How do you make money without winning - long term?

 

The wildly simplistic version is that you have to spend money to make money. It's true but at the same time spending money doesn't guaruntee you'll make money, that's why big businesses get into financial difficulty and go bust.

 

"The wildly simplistic version is that you have to spend money to make money.
It's true but at the same time spending money doesn't guaruntee you'll make money, that's why big businesses get into financial difficulty and go bust."

The concept is financial ROI. At the very least you have to break even at some point.
For all their silverware, Chelsky have cost Roman over 700m quid to get it (financial ROI = -700m) .
Citeh : time will tell on what they achieve and what their ROI is.

 

If Levy wanted nothing but a double your money profit deal for Modric to wave in front of Lewis....he would have sold him to Chelsea a year earlier!

Sorry Juande, we don't look at age before we buy?....Soldado.

Harry took us places you had no hope in hell of, see you next Thursday you mug!

 

I have seen Levy fight tooth and nail to keep Berbatov, Modric, and Bale but they wanted to go and in the end you can't stop, all you can do is get as much as you can for them. I think it's just nonsense to claim that Levy wants to sell these just to make a profit. The real profit for Enic would come with a league winning team.

 

exactly what I meant - although you put it better.

 

Utd have made "the sporting side a priority"?

He should be glad he didn't work for the Glazers. Utd haven't been competing for the type of signings we should have been either (SAF papered over the cracks) - and they have used club revenues to pay off their massive debts in acquiring the club.

ENIC look philanthropic by comparison.

 

I think that one's true, to be fair. Levy seemed to favour bidding for Diarra instead of signing Parker for a quarter of the price and in general we tend to buy players who have at least another 5/6 years in them unless they're a bargain. Soldado could either have been an exception to the rule or perhaps a change in the rule, it's hard to tell.

Agree with the rest though, the Modric saga is the clearest statement of the club's ambition that we could've made and Ramos is a twat.

 

Depends how much it costs us to get there. If you look at City's model of winning 1 league title and an FA Cup in 5 years spending £100s of millions more than us in that time then it won't make ENIC any money. They're a badly run business though so that's not really appropriate comparison. Arsenal could be a comparison as we've been evenly matched over the past few seasons and they've spent about about £40mill more in transfers and probably around £40/50mill more than us in wages. It'll be interesting to see just where they get at the end of the season because £80mill in year is a lot of money for us to spend just to bring us up to being outsiders in the title race, as Arsenal currently are. Liverpool too will probably have spent £40mill more than us in transfers and wages and it's showing too as they've caught us up and maybe even overtaken us. Again £40mill in a year is a lot for us to spend to make sure Liverpool don't overtake us.

The logic is to keep doing what we're doing, if it costs an £80mill spend on top of what we're already spending just to put us in the title mix, like Arsenal, then it doesn't look like there's very good value in spending anymore than we do now. I can't see any profit in us winning the league* unless we do it by keeping our finances in check as we do now. The profit for Enic comes from increasing the club's value when we sell and that's why we're looking at investing off the pitch more. Randy Lerner invested on the pitch and when it didn't bring the improvement needed that money might as well have evapourated. Investing in a new stadium, training ground etc will never carry that level of risk which makes them better investments. With a bigger stadium we can increase our spending to lessen the gap between us and the clubs around us who spend much more, with better training facilities we can get more out of our players and lessen the influence of the spending power of clubs around us again.


*Well at very least the profit is not representative of the money we'd be risking and the odds of it coming good.

 

Keane and Berbatov demanded to leave...and Ramos chose to sell Defoe; Steed; Robinson; Chimbonda; Tanio; Kaboul; boateng; plus others (over half the team that won the cup a few months earlier.
He was the one that allowed the club to sign Bentley (the worst signing in our history); Woodgate (a crock); Hutton (complete ****); Pav (average with outbreaks of good); Gomes (inconsistent at best); Modric (brilliant); Gunter (poor); Dos Santos (Pointless); Gilberto (worst Brazilian in history): Corluka (good)

HE was the manager...HE said that he wanted these players at the time...if he had any principles he should have aired his concerns at the time...not 6 years later!!!!

Comparing us to city makes him look stupid and as for us being able to sign David Villa back in 2008

He chose to join a club which treated it's previous manager so poorly ... he was approached several times while jol was in charge and when he joined he even said that he did so cos he received a "dizzying offer". That don't reflect too well on his personal moral imo.

He was in charge of us for 36 league matches (I think) and we won 9...NINE... and he blames others?

I loved our cup win that season and always had a soft spot for him cos of that...along with the 6-4 reading win and the 4-4 chelsea draw but he should have kept his mouth shut...he sounds like a twat which is a shame.

 

"He should be glad he didn't work for the Glazers.
Utd haven't been competing for the type of signings we should have been either (SAF papered over the cracks) -
and they have used club revenues to pay off their massive debts in acquiring the club."

Are they using the club annual profits to service their loan obligations ??
If so, how much are they taking each year to do so ??

 

Maybe their 70,000 gates bring in a lot of loot,not to mention that tv execs think everyone wants to watch Man United.I don't.I'd prefer to watch a second division game.But tv must bring in some do ray me for the owners.