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Eberechi Eze

harr1984 said:
No offence brain, but the good old 'let's evaluate at the end of the window' that gets trotted out every window after botched attempts is getting tiresome now.

We have had endless opportunities to kick on yet there is always some half baked excuse as to why. ENIC couldn't do it, followed by trying to paint a positive picture of the window all because we acquired one or two decent level PL players supplemented with a load of young hopefuls that we have to pray end up really good.

The long and short of it is ENIC have done well to maximise their asset, but if we ever want to kick on as a FOOTBALL CLUB then we have to have more ambitious owners. This has little to do with Eze, this merely just highlights the owners deficiencies because of how brutal this one is - We have been doing the same dance with transfers for years, nothing has changed regardless of how low or high our stock is....
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No offence taken or perceived.

I get that not everyone will agree with me that the time to evaluate the window is when it's over and that's obviously fine.

Always disappointing when what looked like a potential deal for a really good player doesn't happen. And in most cases where things don't work out things could have been done differently.

I agree there's a pattern. I think that's more a result of where we are in the football pyramid. Personally I doubt Arsenal would have just sat on their hands had we moved faster when it's a player they've wanted for some time. But we can't know, there are so many unknowns to us.

What I want from the club is a plan that includes several options. And the time to evaluate that is when we know what actually ends up getting done. For me. But that's not to say I expect everyone else to agree with that.
 
Muttley said:
It's what I've been beating the drum on and just wrote on the other thread. Realistically the most similar player to MGW is Rogers at Villa. No doubt, our club has done the due diligence there and come to the conclusion that it's a no goer. The 23 year old is their prized asset and contracted until 2030. So we'd be thinking £80m+.

So unless we identify a player that can operate as a top 4 player and is gettable in 10 days then we should all relax.

As I said above, I'm more worried about our recruitment team again. They don't seem to be able to close a door and we've been at this place so many times in our recent history.

One final thought. Perhaps there is a Palhinha equivalent for the 10 position where we can leverage the loan system if there isn't a purchase option.
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Fans are desperate for signings of course. Is Frank? Probably not. But ask a manager if they want Eze if available ofcourse they’ll say yes. We’ve had an interest for a long time but we’re not desperate (despite fans thinking we are).

A Van De Vart type signing would be sensational.
 
braineclipse said:
No offence taken or perceived.

I get that not everyone will agree with me that the time to evaluate the window is when it's over and that's obviously fine.

Always disappointing when what looked like a potential deal for a really good player doesn't happen. And in most cases where things don't work out things could have been done differently.

I agree there's a pattern. I think that's more a result of where we are in the football pyramid. Personally I doubt Arsenal would have just sat on their hands had we moved faster when it's a player they've wanted for some time. But we can't know, there are so many unknowns to us.

What I want from the club is a plan that includes several options. And the time to evaluate that is when we know what actually ends up getting done. For me. But that's not to say I expect everyone else to agree with that.
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Totally fair. Out of interest, what do you think will get done in the next 10 days?

Will we see another Sissoko moment? :cool:
 
DubaiSpur said:
It isn't that he can't help himself - I think that's personalizing things to him too much mate.

It's more that the club, as a whole, just is not run the way the clubs we measure ourselves up against are run. It isn't just Levy (though he does play a part in it) - the club is run in a way that would have kept us perfectly competitive in 2005. 2010. Maybe even 2015. But sadly, not in 2025.

And that isn't because of a conscious decision to keep us in the past or anything silly like that - it's that the environment has evolved to such utterly hypercompetitive levels in 2025 that it has left us behind. Decisions that used to work well, no longer do - certainties that once worked for us, now do not exist.

Our peers are now run by literal nation-states, criminal gangsters, ruthless heads of megacorporations with unfathomable billions. They employ hundreds of world-class people to get every edge possible, on and off the pitch, legal and illegal, across every field - medical, legal, financial. To them the concept of haggling for weeks on a few million pounds would seem quaint - they have plans for transfer targets years in advance, and can spend an extra 70m after already dropping 200m like it's nothing.

Against this, our approach is reactive - we still employ many of the same people we did 20 years ago, make decisions the same reactive way, approach negotiations the same cautious and slow way. And the environment around us has changed to make this no longer competitive.

To boil it down to the simplest analogy - 15 years ago if we had a target, we only needed to be worried about one of the big four gazumping us, we otherwise had the pick of the litter, and clubs had little leverage in trying to withstand our negotiating.

Today, most clubs in the top ten could easily gazump us - the old top four, plus Saudi Sportswashing Machine, City, Villa et al. Plus, most of the other 10 clubs also have rich and ruthlessly ambitious owners, so they don't really get pushed around the way they used to, plus they can all employ the best lawyers, statisticians, etc. to get every edge possible.

The Premier League is an utter monstrouserty, that has left us behind. You can rage against this, as I did for years. Or you can accept it as a sad fact, and look for happiness where you can. I'm going to try to keep doing that.

We'll find some other targets. There'll be a team out on the weekend. Life moves on. And maybe one day, these realities will change, either through new ownership, new ways of operating, or some cataclysm that upends the landscape of the league itself.

Until then - que sera, sera. :)
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DubaiSpur said:
Oh, one other thing - the Director of Football job is meant to be one where you have contacts that tell you about situations like this, so you can avoid them. Agents, binmen, accountants - you're essentially valuable for your network of informants.

For those interested, read up on how these types operate in Italy - it's a hypercompetitive job where knowing which mistress a player saw on a particular weekend is priceless information that DoFs will bid for, just to get an edge in transfer negotiations.

The Prem is like that now. It wasn't before, but it is now exactly like Italian football used to be in the 1990s - flush with cash, hypercompetitive, riven through with legal and illegal means to gain an edge, from doping to tapping up to shady accounting and more.

In fact, the PL does all those things on a level that would make the old Italians blush.

Paratici lives for this world - it's his world, and it's no coincidence that we made some of our best post-Poch transfers under him, from Romero to Deki and Kulu.

But Lange? It's just hard to see him survive in a world like that. The man has no great rolodex to rely on, his experience is relatively minimal (Denmark, a year at Villa and then tossed for the actual DoF in Monchi). So I suspect it weakens us in these sorts of situations where knowing about this deal Arsenal had for Eze through contacts, etc., would have saved us a shedload of embarassment.

It's no surprise Paratici is creeping back into the scope - I suspect he'll oust Lange before long, and to be honest, I think it would help us.
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I feel a script coming on....this would be excellent tv.
 
harr1984 said:
They don't need him? It's called having a squad, it's what the big clubs do - have quality players that can be rotated for all competitions because of injuries etc.

I appreciate that's a foreign concept for you to understand supporting Spurs...
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wish I could like this more than once

I couldn't care less how many quality players we have if the manager thinks he can work with it.

We've got such a small club mindset sometimes
 
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Ah well, it was fun while it lasted, now onto the NEXT bit of fun, the 'will we overpay for Savinho' chase...and hey! Maybe he does something absolutely bonkers like throw 80 million a Villa for Morgan Rodgers as Daniel feels the pain, but again, I ain't betting and it's all part of the Tottenham Transfer tumult!!!!! All aboaaaaaaard!!!!!!
 
Muttley said:
For me, Levy and his staff are top vendors. They negotiates pretty well when selling one of our big players. They just seems awful at other side of the equation....buying players. They are 2 very different things.

It always feels like a Levy regime treats buying like a game of chess. They operate like there is only one winner as opposed to trying to create conditions where all parties win and there is quid pro quo. That is what sales is. Levy has been caught publicly reneging on verbal agreements that have been made around the negotiation table as well. You never do that in sales. It also feels like THFC spend way too much time on every last little clause of the agreement so that all big deals procrastinate. I swear that most other clubs just agree to what it takes to close the deal and then cleans it all up in a new player contract in the next cycle.

What it feels like most cases is that THFC seem to suck the life out of everyone involved and they just retreat from THFC or another club comes in to get the booty. Other clubs don't like dealing with THFC.

We've seen mass changes over the years but for me there are only 2 common denominators - Levy and Collecott. It feels like these 2 finance oriented guys need a round of fecks once in a while from the more "salesy" people on the team. They need to stop analysing the sales conditions and start closing deals and quicker. We all have 20 years of smoke on this one.
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Interestly the one time Levy seemed to genuinely take a back seat in large transfers was in spending the Bale money. We closed a lot of those deals pretty rapidly. Baldini seemed to be fully in charge and the pace and decisiveness of that window felt materially different. However many people have reported that Levy was psychologically scarred by some of the failures of that window. I'd say however that what he needs to understand is that transfers are all gambles and actually while Soldado and Paulinho in particular were relatively expensive flops, I believe we got most of our money back for Paulinho, I think Lamela repaid our investment to a reasonable degree and Eriksen developed into a player we could have sold for more than we paid for the whole lot so overall it wasn't the bad window everyone looks back on it as. And Levy needs to see transfers in that way - get them done knowing that even if you spend ages safeguarding the club with tonnes of performance related clauses you can still end up with a flop or the player thrives and these things are often intangibles - like buying a new house - sometimes its "this is the one" for no real definable reason. A player either feels at home at a club or he doesnt.
 
Silly McSilly Face said:
Interestly the one time Levy seemed to genuinely take a back seat in large transfers was in spending the Bale money. We closed a lot of those deals pretty rapidly. Baldini seemed to be fully in charge and the pace and decisiveness of that window felt materially different. However many people have reported that Levy was psychologically scarred by some of the failures of that window. I'd say however that what he needs to understand is that transfers are all gambles and actually while Soldado and Paulinho in particular were relatively expensive flops, I believe we got most of our money back for Paulinho, I think Lamela repaid our investment to a reasonable degree and Eriksen developed into a player we could have sold for more than we paid for the whole lot so overall it wasn't the bad window everyone looks back on it as. And Levy needs to see transfers in that way - get them done knowing that even if you spend ages safeguarding the club with tonnes of performance related clauses you can still end up with a flop or the player thrives and these things are often intangibles - like buying a new house - sometimes its "this is the one" for no real definable reason. A player either feels at home at a club or he doesnt.
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I think the big problem is that buying and selling to Levy is a nurtured state from working in a wacky industry. Stick him into a sales role at a big company and he would learn very quickly that it's not his vocation at all. He's great at a lot of things. He's not a people person and he's not a communicator. He's probably a logical thinker, not a lateral thinker and is almost certainly guilty of not reading the room.

What's funny about the famous 7 window is that if we had sold Eriksen at his peak, we would have probably got more than we paid for the 7 of them. I'm not sure how right or wrong you are about Levy taking a backseat, but my instincts say that there is no way he wouldn't have been deeply involved alongside Baldini. It's not in his nature to not be that high touch.
 
Muttley said:
I think the big problem is that buying and selling to Levy is a nurtured state from working in a wacky industry. Stick him into a sales role at a big company and he would learn very quickly that it's not his vocation at all. He's great at a lot of things. He's not a people person and he's not a communicator. He's probably a logical thinker, not a lateral thinker and is almost certainly guilty of not reading the room.

What's funny about the famous 7 window is that if we had sold Eriksen at his peak, we would have probably got more than we paid for the 7 of them. I'm not sure how right or wrong you are about Levy taking a backseat, but my instincts say that there is no way he wouldn't have been deeply involved alongside Baldini. It's not in his nature to not be that high touch.
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I think clearly Baldini had an influence in the way things were being done. I think Paratici seemed to have a similar influence particularly actually in our improved willingness to get players out the door to free up squad space taking a loss if necessary. That influence seems to have faded under Lange and our squad feels very bloated and it wouldnt surprise me if we end up with likes of Bissouma sat around earning shedloads playing for the u23s like we have had in the past.
 
@Finney Is Back
Purely in the spirit of understanding I'd be interested to know why you have given my posts the thumbs down.
glasgowspur said:
Has his performances stepped up?
I think they will miss partey more than they would miss Rice tbh.
Totally agree on Arteta, part of me thinks he has knicked Eze to get the fans back onside.
That's a quick high that could wear off very quickly.
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Muttley said:
Totally fair. Out of interest, what do you think will get done in the next 10 days?

Will we see another Sissoko moment? :cool:
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I'm really brick at predicting the future...

Seems like we have cash to spend on deals and a wish to bring in relatively proven players. I want us to succeed at that and expect from the club to have several potential plans to achieve that. I'd be disappointed if there's not at least one quality addition to the squad.

I hope it's not another Sissoko who IIRC wasn't particularly rated by the manager and imo not a good fit for our style of play and needs in the squad.

Hoping for another VVD instead. Levy failed again, didn't pay up for Tapsoba, let the manager down by getting the cheaper easier option type narrative. Actually we got a wonderful player for a more than fair price.
 
glasgowspur said:
Rice was supposed to be the missing piece, the guy to get them over the line.
The player that pushed them past city.
City had a huge collapse and arsenal still couldn't get the job done.
Rice has improved them, but you should not be paying £100m plus to be second best.
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Agree with your logic but that’s not on rice imo
It’s on arteta not being as good a coach as people think IMO
And of course their football getting more and more profitable
Eze changes that’s
 
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