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Daniel Levy - Chairman

Bishop said:
Ok, but half of the 100m wasn't actually spent by him though as you have now been corrected.
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I am happy for you. Congratulations 🥳

We’d spent a fortune. Not just on these two. Le Celco would have had a seven figure loan fee as well. You’re caught up in detail but the point was we’d spent a small fortune - well over £100m - and we were worse off.

You can’t tell me that if Poch had done well with these new players and side, he would have been sacked anyway?
 
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SpurMeUp said:
I am happy for you. Congratulations 🥳

We’d spent a fortune. Not just on these two. Le Celco would have had a seven figure loan fee as well. You’re caught up in detail but the point was we’d spent a small fortune - well over £100m - and we were worse off.

You can’t tell me that if Poch had done well with these new players and side, he would have been sacked anyway?
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Well no obviously not, but I also never thought just those two players were enough to reset the rot that was our squad. Especially not after 12 games. They would be a start but we needed a reset and those two alone were not a reset so I was never that confident that they alone would work.

Then you look at who followed and you see that yeah, those two players alone were not enough to right a sinking ship.

And you're keeping hold really tightly of the £100m figure even though you now know that wasn't the case. Is it because it fits the narrative you want to sell?
 
Bishop said:
Well no obviously not, but I also never thought just those two players were enough to reset the rot that was our squad. Especially not after 12 games. They would be a start but we needed a reset and those two alone were not a reset so I was never that confident that they alone would work.

Then you look at who followed and you see that yeah, those two players alone were not enough to right a sinking ship.
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Time allows perspective. But then it looked like we had a decent side that had got the final of the CL. Adding a midfield, Sess, Clark should have seen us power forward. But Poch fell apart. Partly as Nombele and LeCelco were not the stellar players we’d thought they were.
Bishop said:
And you're keeping hold really tightly of the £100m figure even though you now know that wasn't the case. Is it because it fits the narrative you want to sell?
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If you add up the signings we did make excluding LeCelco it’s over 100m
 
SpurMeUp said:
Time allows perspective. But then it looked like we had a decent side that had got the final of the CL. Adding a midfield, Sess, Clark should have seen us power forward. But Poch fell apart. Partly as Nombele and LeCelco were not the stellar players we’d thought they were.
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It might sound predictable but I was one of those that hated our squad at the time and bemonead it's stagnate nature. It's a principle I believe very strongly in football that you constantly need to bring in new faces to keep your both fresh and new ears hear the same old instructions.

Yeah we got to a CL final but that squad was not a the 2nd best team in Europe we didn't get there strongly, we struggled and scraped through every round. It was the last hurrah and the team massively needed freshening up.
SpurMeUp said:
If you add up the signings we did make excluding LeCelco it’s over 100m
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Clark was a club signing and Sess had a long term injury when we bought him. He played 15 minutes under Poch. So one club signing and three incomings one I don't think he even wanted (Sess) and 2 of those incomings injured when purchased one of them long term. Did you really see that as a rebuild or that Poch actually had use of "£100m" of talent?
 
Bishop said:
The desire to back Levy no matter the cost is the cause of this revisionism. As you said Lo Celso came to us injured and had barely played, I think he'd been on the pitch 5 times before Poch got the sack and like you said it was actually in Mourinho's tenure that we decided to go through with the purchase. So if we do want to criticise Poch and that's fair enough, he wasn't perfect you can't really blame him for a purchase of a player that wasn't even made while he still manager can you?

Mourinho confirmed the signing not Poch and that's largely because he had a decent run of form at the time. This is the bit I hate about fans when they want to spin a particular narrative. Now it's that Ndombele and Lo Celso were always terrible from day one which is far, far from the truth.
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The Lo Celso loan deal was clearly a work around (for whatever reason) and was a permanent deal in all but name - and i say that as someone who entirely backs Poch over the club during that period.
 
billyiddo said:
The Lo Celso loan deal was clearly a work around and was a permanent deal in all but name - and i say that as someone who entirely backs Poch over the club during that period.
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My friend I hear you but the deal was an option to buy not an obligation meaning we did not have to confirm the purchase if we thought Lo Celso was a a dud. The fact is at the time we actually confirmed the deal we were happy to do so because he was playing well.

There's no shame in that, we can make mistakes (I don't even think GLC was a mistake, just the managers we had at the time). We bought GLC because he was playing well under Jose and Mourinho wanted him.
 
Bishop said:
My friend I hear you but the deal was an option to buy not an obligation meaning we did not have to confirm the purchase if we thought Lo Celso was a a dud. The fact is at the time we actually confirmed the deal we were happy to do so because he was playing well.

There's no shame in that, we can make mistakes (I don't even think GLC was a mistake, just the managers we had at the time). We bought GLC because he was playing well under Jose and Mourinho wanted him.
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I disagree though, the deal was always going to happen, the payment was just deferred until a later date. You don't put a 14m down payment on a deal that you aren't going to see through imv
 
billyiddo said:
I disagree though, the deal was always going to happen, the payment was just deferred until a later date. You don't put a 14m down payment on a deal that you aren't going to see through imv
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If he had been a total dud we would have pulled out of the deal as we were allowed to. We wouldn't have made sure it was an option to buy and not an obligation if we didn't want the safety net of pulling out. That alone probably made the loan fee higher as an extra safety blanket for Betis.
 
Bishop said:
If he had been a total dud we would have pulled out of the deal as we were allowed to. We wouldn't have made sure it was an option to buy and not an obligation if we didn't want the safety net of pulling out. That alone probably made the loan fee higher as an extra safety blanket for Betis.
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It was an option to get around the sell on they owed PSG
If it was an obligation then PSG would have got their %
 
Bishop said:
It might sound predictable but I was one of those that hated our squad at the time and bemonead it's stagnate nature. It's a principle I believe very strongly in football that you constantly need to bring in new faces to keep your both fresh and new ears hear the same old instructions.

Yeah we got to a CL final but that squad was not a the 2nd best team in Europe we didn't get there strongly, we struggled and scraped through every round. It was the last hurrah and the team massively needed freshening up.
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But we had done just that. Yet when we didn’t refresh the team and developed the players we had we had one of our best seasons. Not sure it’s always black and white.
Bishop said:
Clark was a club signing and Sess had a long term injury when we bought him. He played 15 minutes under Poch. So one club signing and three incomings one I don't think he even wanted (Sess) and 2 of those incomings injured when purchased one of them long term. Did you really see that as a rebuild or that Poch actually had use of "£100m" of talent?
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We threw a lot of money at players who didn’t enhance us. They tied up our wage budget for many years. In hindsight it was an unmitigated disaster of a transfer window.

If we want to attribute one core factor to why Poch lost his job it was these ‘stellar’ players who turned out to be duds. We only knew they were duds for sure many years later after 3 different managers. At the time there was panic in Pochs management chopping and change the side and formation. And it looked like he had lost his verve after the CL final. In fact we just had a worse squad.
 
SpurMeUp said:
If we want to attribute one core factor to why Poch lost his job it was these ‘stellar’ players who turned out to be duds
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This would not have been a considerstion at the time of his sacking as there was absolutely no way of knowing how the transfers would have panned out after a handful of games in to their time at the club.
 
SpurMeUp said:
It is simple: we spent well over 100m, Poch had a free rein to spend the cash, and we were significantly worse than we were. In fact it took us 5 years to recover from these signings! Poch paid with his job.
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We spent over £100m on two players to put them into a team that was dead.
I will maintain to my dieing that the players we refused to move on were as culpable as the players we brought in.
Ndombele is rightly criticised for his lack effort, yet I seldom see the same criticism for Eriksen who for 18 months was an empty shirt.
GLC is critised for being fit for Argentina but not for us. I never hear how Harry never ever tried to manage his international minutes, even in friendlies.
I hear a lot about our much vaunted DESK, well for me they were part of the problem.
They, and a couple of others had formed a clique, a power group, and tough if you weren't part of it.
I watched games were they wouldn't pass to anyone else, where deadballs were "dominated" by them and everything was about them, well actually it was about one man, a man I think led the group.

All just my humble opinion of course, based on observations and past experiences.
 
glasgowspur said:
We spent over £100m on two players to put them into a team that was dead.
I will maintain to my dieing that the players we refused to move on were as culpable as the players we brought in.
Ndombele is rightly criticised for his lack effort, yet I seldom see the same criticism for Eriksen who for 18 months was an empty shirt.
GLC is critised for being fit for Argentina but not for us. I never hear how Harry never ever tried to manage his international minutes, even in friendlies.
I hear a lot about our much vaunted DESK, well for me they were part of the problem.
They, and a couple of others had formed a clique, a power group, and tough if you weren't part of it.
I watched games were they wouldn't pass to anyone else, where deadballs were "dominated" by them and everything was about them, well actually it was about one man, a man I think led the group.

All just my humble opinion of course, based on observations and past experiences.
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I actually think people are looking in the wrong place on this one. It's easy to look at the end of Poch's tenure. The root cause comes 2 years before.

It's a much bigger challenge on your chairman when you call out his poor multi-year financial modelling. Levy told us all 2 things:

1) The stadium and football operations financial models were mutually exclusive.
2) The plan was to achieve CL revenues by the time the stadium opened.

Bold statements, completely contradicted when he didn't release any net spending to Poch until after 3rd April 2019 when the stadium opened and after 1st June 2019 when we played in a CL final. Our team was done when we exited the 2016/17 season and needed investment at that point.

Interesting that Spurs played in the CL in the 16/17, 17/18 and 18/19 seasons. That is 3 lots of CL revenues before the stadium opened. Poch was quite right to ask where that £100m of INCREMENTAL revenue went that him and his players made this club wasn't in Levy's original financial model. It's obvious it went on the stadium overspend. We also posted world record profits of £113m in the 17/18 season and followed that up with £69m. We literally gave HMRC £35m of Poch's potential transfer kitty.

I've said this before but Levy and Collecott got their multi-year financial modelling messaging so wrong in the years from 2015-2020. They played the fans with 2 patronising narratives that we all know just weren't true. They were just massaging the club to make it attractive to financial institutions that would be managing our current debt. It was all about the interest rate.

When you're not honest in business it has a very long lasting impact on relationships. Levy should have just told us the truth. How it was going to. It would have been OK, but he chose to talk to us in a condescending, patronising way and reading between the fuzzy lines, Poch was in the same boat as us. He didn't know either that all this incremental money he made our club wasn't coming back to him.
 
SpurMeUp said:
As is often the case observers don’t know where the balance of blame lies. At that time Ndombele was gold and it was just the manager. Change the manager and the 60m of talent would shine and we’d start winning.


Don’t forget we went from Sissoko in midfield! Anyone should have been a big upgrade. But we were much worse. We also spent on others too. All that outlay and nothing to show for it. If you’d been let lose with the kitty and signed such - average is kind - players, you probably do deserve the sack!
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I have no idea what you’re on about. Ndombele played a few (good) games for Pochettino and then got injured. Lo Celso barely played for Pochettino. Sessegnon arrived injured. Poch was mainly still having to play the players he told the chairman he needed to replace.

As I said before, we had no idea whether the 3 first team players Poch had brought in were terrible, average or great at the point he was sacked as we barely got to see them. We then swapped the manager out for an ultra defensive narcissistic has-been.
 
SpurMeUp said:
Time allows perspective. But then it looked like we had a decent side that had got the final of the CL. Adding a midfield, Sess, Clark should have seen us power forward. But Poch fell apart. Partly as Nombele and LeCelco were not the stellar players we’d thought they were.


If you add up the signings we did make excluding LeCelco it’s over 100m
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lol….. Sessegnon was injured and didn’t play. Clarke was NOWHERE NEAR ready (and not wanted by Pochettino).
 
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