Just Where Are The Club Going?

[Spursalot]

That's one example. There are plenty of other examples as we well know.

To be honest out of all of this seasons signings the only one that confuses me utterly is Dembele.



We bought him for his buyout clause. So why did we wait until then to do it?


All the other transfers were far far more complicated.

 

[parklane1]

Is it emotional spew when the club you have been going to watch since 1972 is in the hands of a clueless manager? No amount of discussion on finances, structure etc will detract fom the fact that AVB hasnt a clue

I do not know about emotional spew but it is definatly knee jerk, saying a manger is clueless after 3 games shows a lack of knowledge.

 

[spasm]

To the Original Poster

Stock Market, two reasons come easily to mind

1. There is a cost to maintaining a PLC, administration, reporting, etc. This also affects point 2
2. It is easier to get financing for the stadium with ENIC as sole owners (and potentially better interest rates as well).

So answer is it simply made fiscal sense and was potentially necessary to facilitate the next major step in the clubs history, i.e. the Stadium project


New management, mostly speculation, but some logical reasoning

- The club is looking to modernize it's approach, new facilities for training, hopefully improved youth - senior transition, new stadium that will bring with it a greater role in the local area and community
- Add in some of the challenges/disagreements with previous manager, plus the fact that this was always going to be a significant squad change summer, the club moved to be proactive and ambitious.
- Is AVB the real deal? I don't know, but I will call you out on the 3 dire performances, imo, only today was truly poor.

Transfer Window, my view

- everyone thinks it's so easy to do transfers, one big reason it isn't is clubs like Cheat$ki/City/Anzi/PSG/Pool/etc. No team is going to sell their "prize assets" for cheap early when the chance is one of those will swoop in and pay double market value, so a lot of the clubs wait until it looks like those clubs have finished doing their business.
- If this brick is so easy, and clubs should just spend the money, why did Real take so long to get Modric, after all, what's 5M here or there?
- Liverpool is a much bigger club in terms of what they will spend, wages, attraction globally, where is their World Class striker? again, so many of them out of work right now, dying to come to a non CL club that will pay sub 100K wages *sarcasm*

Squad

- Can we stop with the King/VDV/Modric conversation, yes they have gone, but none were the action of the club, it happens.
- You need 4 strikers if you play two up front, seems under AVB we won't
- We have 4 keepers because nobody wants to buy Gomes/Carlo, just like nobody wants JJ/Bentley/Thudd
- You complain about lack of WC, yet when the club saw a player that has as much potential to be WC as Bale (Lloris) become available and bought him, we have too many keepers??

And to the whole myth of Spurs being an asset for sale, if ENIC wanted to sell Spurs purely for profit, they should have done it years ago, or at worst, when we qualified for CL. Does not make sense running a hundred million dollar business for a decade to then sell it, payback over time simply not enough


What people need to temper their emotion with is the hard facts

- Tottenham as a club and a business is operating in a sport where numerous of our competition are simply not playing by the rules. The Spanish and Italian clubs for decades have benefitted from Government funding, tax abatements and corruption. The sugar daddy clubs are now not just one off cases, and FIFA/EUFA are protecting their own interest.
- Add in the player power shift and the dependency on CL money to move up (with 6+ clubs fighting for 4 spots), it's not so black and white.


You should be worried for the future of the Club, so should Scum and Pool fans, the game is stacked against us. Just not for the emotional spew that most people are on.

will you be my friend on GG?

 

[Sheffield Spur]

We're not Chelsea - we can;t just go around offering £25+ million for players and pay them astronomical wages.

You reckon???

Not for 7-8 players maybe. But for 1 or 2. I bet we can.

 

[Sheffield Spur]

I get the feeling some in this thread have unrealistic expectations about the players who are going to be attracted to a non-CL club.

In addition to unrealistic expectations about how much we can afford to spend and our wage structure.

Well I disagree with everything you have said. Sorry. Spurs are not paupers.

 

[Sheffield Spur]

Moutinho was the one AVB wanted, priority number one if we could get him, so Levy stretched as far as he could. No £20+ million forward will come to us on less than £100k a week. We could have used someone to offer competition to Ade, but not in that price range.

Totally disagree mate.

We are not going to get the striker we need on £40k a week. £100+ a week we will. Thats where the biggest costs are. Goals win points win prizes.

 

[Sheffield Spur]

If you're not content then that's something you have to deal with.


I'll just keep supporting spurs in the mean time.

There is the problem.

I want Spurs to win the PL and CL,

 

[Sheffield Spur]

Infact I'm still astonished at people who don't respect Levy. I find his transfer brinkmanship a tad frustrating, but if you look at our league performances over the last decade, we perform way above our weight in terms of the wages we are able to pay and the income we generate. I think we've finished top 5 in 5 out of the last 10 years, that's 50% of the time!

Its cost us bigtime.

 

[chicken_badge]

If you want to seriously know where our club is going you do not look at the last three games.

You look at the last ten years.
You go back to 2003, when ENIC really got involved.
You start with the disappointment of the Hoddle era, you follow it through a REAL time of limbo with Pleat, the false start of Santini.
You look at Jol blending together the first great Tottenham side in a decade, the ruthless appointment of Ramos, the desperate appointment of Redknapp.

Throughout this journey you can see Levy make mistakes, but you can also see him learning from them. Not least in the transfer market, where our story has allows us to enjoy some fabulous players.

We have gone from a club who had no hope of getting a Champions League place, to one where it is now an expectation. Our football has been great, widely acknowledged as one of the best teams in Europe to watch.

We have an ambitious, talented, young manager with a point to prove in this city, a man whose style is more similar to that of Spain and Barcelona than the vast majority of coaches around him.

We have a young squad, of largely gifted but level-headed players. Every single one of them is comfortable on the ball, and wants to play a composed and clever game.

We have a stadium project that is slowly, slowly coming on.

We have a steady stream of lucrative sponsorship, that always rival the biggest deals around. People pay good money to be linked with us.

So where are we going? I hope that this year AVB will mould a good footballing team, with some superb performances to get people talking. Next year, to sustain a challenge for a top three place, to become a secure CL side. AVB builds a true legacy.

The stadium within four years and as that becomes reality the attractiveness for investment really blossoms. THFC become even more capable of competing on a financial level?

Dare we dream it, one of the two major honours within five years?

That's where I would like us to be going and if you follow the trend of ten years, rather than three games, it's a more realistic vision.

The future's bright, the future's lilywhite!

 

[Sheffield Spur]

If you want to seriously know where our club is going you do not look at the last three games.

You look at the last ten years.
You go back to 2003, when ENIC really got involved.
You start with the disappointment of the Hoddle era, you follow it through a REAL time of limbo with Pleat, the false start of Santini.
You look at Jol blending together the first great Tottenham side in a decade, the ruthless appointment of Ramos, the desperate appointment of Redknapp.

Throughout this journey you can see Levy make mistakes, but you can also see him learning from them. Not least in the transfer market, where our story has allows us to enjoy some fabulous players.

We have gone from a club who had no hope of getting a Champions League place, to one where it is now an expectation. Our football has been great, widely acknowledged as one of the best teams in Europe to watch.

We have an ambitious, talented, young manager with a point to prove in this city, a man whose style is more similar to that of Spain and Barcelona than the vast majority of coaches around him.

We have a young squad, of largely gifted but level-headed players. Every single one of them is comfortable on the ball, and wants to play a composed and clever game.

We have a stadium project that is slowly, slowly coming on.

We have a steady stream of lucrative sponsorship, that always rival the biggest deals around. People pay good money to be linked with us.

So where are we going? I hope that this year AVB will mould a good footballing team, with some superb performances to get people talking. Next year, to sustain a challenge for a top three place, to become a secure CL side. AVB builds a true legacy.

The stadium within four years and as that becomes reality the attractiveness for investment really blossoms. THFC become even more capable of competing on a financial level?

Dare we dream it, one of the two major honours within five years?

That's where I would like us to be going and if you follow the trend of ten years, rather than three games, it's a more realistic vision.

Decent post Bud.

 

[metalgear]

modric and vdv wanted to leave.

i blame redknapp for not getting CL last season

we are still recovering from that

 

[Gilzeantoscore]

Just read on soccernet that Porto accepted our offer for Moutinho. He also initially accepted personal terms. So there you have it, quotes and all from AVB, these deals are doable, given sufficient time. But let's not try, let's just aim for "a nice little cup run and top ten in the league."

 

[Hully]

I think we need to be a bit more realistic, we've been punching above our weight for the last three years, given the squad we had. Trouble is we've got used to it and suddenly finishing 4th above Chelsea, above Liverpool isn't enough.
Champions League is the holy grail and qualifying for it is now the soul pursue of a few clubs. The extra income it guarantees allows a club to be run on a completely different financial footing and a wage structure unsustainable for those outside the that exclusive club. Just see what's happened to Liverpool since they dropped out of the top 4 and lost that extra cash.
Arsenal have been in CL for 14 years straight, I reckon that has made them an extra £250m.
Now we keep being linked to players in the £150k a week plus bracket and it's simply not realistic.
Breaking into the top 4 is the hardest thing to achieve in English football, the difference in finances is a minimum of £26m a year. Finishing 4th twice in three years is astounding, especially given that Man C have bought their way in during that time. We've done it on a budget a fraction the size of the established CL clubs.
The fair play rules mean we can't simply throw money at it, we have to out perform teams above us on a smaller budget, that's the challenge. One we were raising to.

Now we have made changes, moved in a different direction (what ever that means). Personally I think we've taken a big gamble.

I have every confidence in Levy's wheeling and dealing, and his commercial business sense, but when it comes to footballing decisions more often than not he gets it wrong.

What we have done has been done with the club's best intentions in mind, but I think will prove counterproductive.

The challenge of qualifying for the champions league has been given to a manager who I consider totally inadequate, lacking in tactical ability and experience. I appreciate the decision was made for the best of reasons but I just think we got it wrong.

How have we achieved the top 4 finishes? We've get the very best out of a small group of top quality players (Bale, VDV, Modric, Gallas, King) and surrounded them with players that help to get the best out of them.
The systems we played had the same aim, to get the most out of those players, Bale in particular. The focus was always on the players rather than the system which I think is an important factor as it encourages flair and creativity.

Now we have AVB in charge and I can see us getting a lot of things badly wrong.
4-2-3-1 is now the system, rigidly so, every manager facing us this year already knows how we will line up and play. I saw 3 preseason games and we already looked predictable. They saw the same thing at Chelsea last year and worked them out.
All the focus is on fitting players into a system, not fitting a system to the players. I feel we're trying to prove a theory rather than organising a football team based on the challenge ahead.
Prime example for me is Bale who is being asked to play inside rather than his best position out wide. Now last year he was given the freedom to come inside, but it was a tactic to allow either BAE or Ade to fill the void outside and create space. Creating space especially against parked buses is vital, we're seeing the result of a system that is so compact space is at a premium and creativity is stifled. That's not the sort of football I want to see us play.

We've made a lot of changes, probably too many, it will take a while for us to gel this season, CL qualification is probably already out of the question. We needed evolution rather than revolution, but that's what we've given the manager the mandate to do and we need to accept the consequences.

Everything that has been done has been with the best of intentions, but in my opinion mistakes have been made. I don't like to have regrets, they're pointless, but I wonder what Harry could have achieved if he had been backed like AVB has been.

 

[paxtonwolf]

Just read on soccernet that Porto accepted our offer for Moutinho. He also initially accepted personal terms. So there you have it, quotes and all from AVB, these deals are doable, given sufficient time. But let's not try, let's just aim for "a nice little cup run and top ten in the league."

Can we not still negotiate a deal with Porto/Moutinho this week/next week, so that he becomes our player on Jan 1st??

 

[Ron The Shelf]

I do not know about emotional spew but it is definatly knee jerk, saying a manger is clueless after 3 games shows a lack of knowledge.

It is not about 3 games. it is about how he conducted himself at Chelsea and the mistakes he made there, and the fact he appears to be making exactly the same mistakes here.

 

[Spursalot]

It is not about 3 games. it is about how he conducted himself at Chelsea and the mistakes he made there, and the fact he appears to be making exactly the same mistakes here.

The fact that he tried to change things too quickly at Chelsea looks like the opposite problem he is having here. People seem to be clamouring for him to change things faster and bring the players he has signed into the first team.


To claim that is the same issue is ludicrous.

 

[jts1882]

Excellent post by Raziel.

I'll add that Levy and Enic are looking to the future. The TV money in the PL continues to increase as football becomes more global and PL football clubs become more valuable. I have no doubt that they are in it primarily for the money (the original name of Enic is the clue) but I'm equally sure that the big money is in the long-term value of the club, not from skimming a few million from the transfer budget. They stand to add hundreds of millions to the value of the club, so keeping £5m of the Modric money for the "yacht fund" is small time.

Fortunately, achieving this return requires a successful team so their interest and that of the fans are best served the same way. We could go into debt to fund player purchases and wages but this will just be short-term as the debt will eventually prevent further spending (or worse, see Leeds Utd). Ultimately, money spent on players is more productive than money spent on interest payments. Or we could look to invest in a new state of the art training centre, to help develop young players and optimise the health and fitness of existing players, we could look to invest in a new stadium that will allow us to compete financially with richer clubs, and plan for long-term success. And you know what, this is what Levy is doing. We will move to the new training centre this month and an announcement on the new stadium is likely fairly soon.

Replacing 'Arry with AVB is also part of the long-term thinking. Perhaps it would have been safer to keep 'Arry for another year or two while moving ahead with the stadium, but 'Arry was 65 and quite reasonably from his perspective was interested in the short-term. A change to a younger manager more interested in working on the long-term development must have appealed to Levy and 'Arry's contract demands either forced his hand or gave him the excuse he wanted.

Finally, in answer to the follow question ...

It is a good question as when you look at some of our transfers like Vertonghen and Sigurdsson, these were being done while Redknapp was still here but were completed just before or during AVBs reign. Who was behind these deals? Levy obviously knew Redknapp was gone/going but still signed players that apparently Redknapp wanted.

... I think it very likely that Levy had contact with AVB before 'Arry's termination. He must have being looking at new managers from last summer as it was expected that 'Arry would leave after last season (Capello was leaving the England job after Euro2012 or the court case could have gone the other way). AVB would have appealed back then, even with the expense of buying out his Porto contract, getting him free would have been even more appealing. I think it quite likely that Levy talked to AVB while 'Arry was courting the England selectors and this might have continued through the end of the season. AVB might well have approved these two signings long before his appointment.

 

[Jordinho]

To be honest out of all of this seasons signings the only one that confuses me utterly is Dembele.



We bought him for his buyout clause. So why did we wait until then to do it?


All the other transfers were far far more complicated.

There were other, bigger clubs sniffing around. Could be the player wanted to see if any of them would come in for him.

 

[The Moonlit Knight]

modric and vdv wanted to leave.

i blame redknapp for not getting CL last season

we are still recovering from that

We finished 4th, which was punching above our weight even with the players we had.

But what if we had signed Parker BEFORE the City/Utd games? We may have got a point from one of them (which would have seen us finish 3rd). But no, despite Redknapp wanting him all Summer we left it to the very last minute to get both him and Ade in. In the Summer when it was clear we needed to strengthen with some quality, we fudged around and ended up having to sign a couple of oldies on short term contracts to plug the squad gaps.

I'm sorry but this isn't about Redknapp or AVB. This is about a Chairman who has routinely fudged about in the transfer windows, and Managers getting fired when in reality they had little chance to succeed because their targets were not secured and worse than that, the attempted purchase of the targets was left so late in the day that decent alternatives could also NOT be found.

 

[Sheffield Spur]

We finished 4th, which was punching above our weight even with the players we had.

But what if we had signed Parker BEFORE the City/Utd games? We may have got a point from one of them (which would have seen us finish 3rd). But no, despite Redknapp wanting him all Summer we left it to the very last minute to get both him and Ade in. In the Summer when it was clear we needed to strengthen with some quality, we fudged around and ended up having to sign a couple of oldies on short term contracts to plug the squad gaps.

I'm sorry but this isn't about Redknapp or AVB. This is about a Chairman who has routinely fudged about in the transfer windows, and Managers getting fired when in reality they had little chance to succeed because their targets were not secured and worse than that, the attempted purchase of the targets was left so late in the day that decent alternatives could also NOT be found.

=D>=D>=D>=D>

Whilst I don't think the managers are blameless MK - Arry and his England 'marketing' cost us 3rd last season IMHO, as well, CL qualification and a lot of dough - the current and previous regimes have sure got through a lot of managers. Ramos was a disaster, and could never speak English. But is it a blame culture by the board too, to camouflage their own shortcomings??

The last minute bargain hunting, cost shaving and brinkmanship by Levy is absurd and has cost us dearly IMHO. You illustrate just why. AVB is now going to have to go through the season (if he lasts that long) without his no. 1 transfer target and kingmaker to his tactics. Moutinho should have been no. 1 on the list of priorities, and a powerful hitman striker no. 2. Early in the window, not the last day. The January window? Forget it. Its notoriously bad for major signings, as has been debated on here numerous times. Unless you are happy with the Rasiaks of this world.

It may be early days, and this isn't just about the first 3 results, bad as they were, its about where the problem really lies. If AVB fails, then it really should be a failure by the chairman and board too. AVB should be last chance saloon for Levy.

As for this absurd notion that Spurs are 'poor', remarkably I beg to differ. Are we not one of the richest clubs around? We are not going to bridge the gap to the top and the elite without paying the going rate/top dollar, and for the right personnel.

Did anyone really think that Moutinho (already paid £80k a week at Porto, according to Saturday's Daily Mail) would move to Spurs without a hefty pay rise (like it or not)? Of course not! He held all the bargaining chips, and he and his agent will have known it. Porto also held a lot of the chips too. We didn't. We were always going to have to pay a fortune for him. Levy let a long and drawn out game of cat and mouse with Real Madrid over Modric impact on the Moutinho deal. Plus he still didn't end up with what Chelsea offered for Modric either, and it then impacted on the timescale for buying Moutinho. Those two deals should have been done after AVB arrived, leaving AVB and Levy weeks to get the other pieces of the jigsaw right too.