Why is questioning the large rise in the cost of the stadium trolling? Surely that is a reasonable question?
Surely it is also right to question why money and time was spent pursuing a stadium the fans did not want and also had little chance of being fruitful.
You are right neither of us know the truth about Stratford, but I think it is fair to ask these questions particularly in the context of our spending. I believe more fans would if we had not been relatively successful.
A few people have been kind to you and not just ignored you as a troll/WUM (your posts can quite easily be interpreted that way), so I will give you a real response.
You are either ignoring out of ignorance or by purpose a large amount of the details re the stadium
- Our initial plans (which were for WHL, Strafford was 2nd option) had very little support from local council or London, none from transport authorities (were numerous ridiculous requests for Spurs to pay for multi million pound road/underground upgrades)
- The properties that required court orders (archway ring a bell?) for us to gain access to the additional land area to build the stadium on literally dragged on for years (even after Stratford decision was made)
- Strafford was a plan B and leverage to gain support for new WHL, and it worked. Why was it looked at? for that exact reason as well as it's simply due diligence from a business perspective (Levy would have been negligent if he didn't), additional;y while unpopular with a segment of our fans, no one in the club or you can dismiss an idea because "fans" (a non quantified statement) didn't like it
- Part of the cost changes were due to scope of project changing (NFL, multi-purpose facility and Levy pushing to make the stadium not only one of the best in world, but future proofed as well), and yes Brexit and time delays also add to cost.
- Chelsea has effectively unlimited budget, yet they have evaluated multiple sites, are taking many years and will actually spend more time in the build stage than Spurs
I wrote a post a while back on Levy and the trajectory of this club, I'm not going to go back in detail, but basically the last 36+ years at this club can be looked at like this
- Pre PL, pre Sugar decade where the club regularly got top 4, challenged for trophies (and won) them, was financially competitive
= Sugar decade where our results fell off a cliff (no top 4), financial troubles, and a catastrophic failure to take advantage of the PL & CL money era. This led to the creation of the Sky 4 and the massive gap between those clubs and all others.
- Levy era where it has taken us 12+ years to recover to levels similar to our re PL status (and exceed in terms of consistency), doing that while competing against financial doping of clubs, massive fiscal disadvantage as hangover of Sugar decade) and consistently improving club facilities, on pitch performances and club profile.
A few people have mentioned it, these are billion dollar decisions that very rarely are made as cavalierly as people claim/want/think and details matter, even a "couple extra million to get a deal done early"
When Levy took over, we were behind (or at best on equal footing) with clubs like Saudi Sportswashing Machine, Everton, Aston Villa, West Ham and leagues behind Liverpool & the Scum, we hadn't been to Europe in decades, in the next two months we will play in the CL against the biggest club in the world and 90K fans will be there to sing ... and people want to bitch still ...
