Daniel Levy's Transfer Policy Revealed

[THFC6061]

 

[Gazza Dazzla]

:lol: like that

 

[awesome dawson]

Best chairman we've had in my lifetime of supporting Spurs.

Nightmare for other clubs though!

 

[harr1984]

Likes this.

 

[Howard Webb]

One league cup.

Just sayin

 

[Modric THFC]

Lets not act as if he's infallible in the transfer market.
He's made huge losses on some brick buys.

 

[Spursalot]

Person makes humorous post.


People make serious comments. :lol:

 

[THFC6061]

Person makes humorous post.


People make serious comments. :lol:

I wonder how many recognised the quote from the Liam Neeson film "Taken"?

 

[jimmyb]

Lets not act as if he's infallible in the transfer market.
He's made huge losses on some brick buys.

And so has every other person who was ever responsible for buying players.

It's the overall account that matters. Not the individual transaction. And Levy is massively in credit.

Love the original post, by the way!

 

[Spursalot]

I wonder how many recognised the quote from the Liam Neeson film "Taken"?

I'll admit it did take me a second to remember which film, though when reading it i did it in Liam Neeson's voice without even thinking.

 

[onlyme]

I believe the current response for such stuff is LOL.

But that ain't a million miles away from the truth so..it is not as good as the sunroof gag about the Poles but it's still good.

 

[skyfarer]

He can be frustrating, but it's undeniable that Levy's done very well for us considering that we have a small stadium and the sixth highest turnover in the league, well behind the top five, yet we somehow manage to construct the best training facilities in England, prepare for a new stadium, *and* challenge the likes of Arse and Chelsea for top four with self-generated funds. We're well ahead of the others who ought to be in our financial level (Everton, Saudi Sportswashing Machine, Villa - note that Saudi Sportswashing Machine with our old scout Carr are attempting to duplicate Levy's 'buy young, high potential, low wages' model but are handicapped by Ashley).

I think if it weren't for Chelsea and Emirates Marketing Project hitting the jackpot, we'd be a perennial CL team by now.

 

[thfcsteff]

Lets not act as if he's infallible in the transfer market.
He's made huge losses on some brick buys.

When he's been tempted out of the policy he has been trying to implement since the days of Ghodd, yes, he has taken a massive brick here and there. But I think Arnesen was decent Comolli was far FAR better than reputed and the current set-up appears to have it's head screwed on too. He has also allowed 'the game' to fudge us out of a player a couple of times, but overall, his record is pretty excellent IMHO, especially for a club with 36000 seats and one CL campaign ever.

 

[Jordinho]

From RAWK of all places, in their thread on Spurs:

The chairmen of west brom and norwich. There's loads of really good chairmen making good jobs of running their clubs, in competent and highly successful ways that involve the fans to a far greater extent than the likes of spurs etc, and who are making at least as good a fist of the had they are being dealt as D L. He's very good at some aspects of his job, but not so good as others.

I think you have to look at aperiod slightly longer than the immediate, a few years ago for example the Chairmen of Middlesborough and Charlton were being lauded. That's what I mean about standing back and not focussing merely on current highs or lows. Truth is Spurs are a club with access to resources on a par with Villa, Saudi Sportswashing Machine, Everton, and Sunderland, with a bit of London weighting thrown in - not that Chigwell is strictly speaking London - we're competing however with clubs with far greater resources such as yourselves, Chelsea, Arsenal, Utd, and City. Slowly but surely we've inched our way up there, catching some, whilst leaving the aforementioned peers behind. Did that happen by fluke? Have we built our current squad by chance? The fact that we've spent a net £6.5m total on transfers over 10 windows/five seasons including this one (£650k a season), whilst keeping our wage-bill to Villa type levels, and managed the tricky task of selling our best players whilst still steadily improving the quality of the squad over the period is all testament to Levy's acumen in my opinion.

Think that's an excellent point. You had that initial couple of seasons of spending didn't you? And then the sales of Berbatov and Modric have, in the long term, effectively paid for it. Fair to say that gambling on the Berbatov price nearly didn't pay off in terms of it having a pretty major impact on that season? Huge gamble in some ways but it ultimately paid off with a season in the Champions League under 'Arry, and a Messi conversion of a penalty away from a second. I think the other interesting thing is the huge jump in your wage bill over the past five years - even between 2010 and 2011 it's pretty significant. I'm not sure that's sustainable for you without CL revenue or without cashing in on players? (Or without gobbling up the new tv money going forward). I know you compare it to Villa, which is fair enough, but O'Neill bought utter dross to inflate their wage bill to those levels.

The rise in wages in 2011 was only in part down to numbers, but largely down to CL bonuses, and maintained pretty much the same proportion of income. They haven't released their figures for last year, but from the outside you can see that they've pretty aggressively cut the squad since then. They would have had the fall in bonuses, but also out went crouch, keane, pavlyuchenko, palacios, o hara, hutton and woodgate. and a bunch of players went out on loans. They only signed parker, friedel, Adebayor on loan, and one or two six month deals to cover players that went out on loan.

You and Levy disagreeing again? Squad size was what was cited as the main reason for the increase in both their half-yearly and yearly results for that period, with bonus payments coming in with general wage inflation as additional factors. Which does then feed into the 'streamlining' angle but Levy hints in the full year results that retaining the players they want to keep means longer term contracts on more competitive salaries (ie paying more) so I'd not be expecting them to drop down to their previous levels even in the absence of CL football, they obviously can't trim the squad repeatedly to the extent they did last summer so it's definitely not sustainable to maintain the spending that way, and all this whilst considering how to fund a move to a new stadium.

Just read this reply to RH, and so perhaps you're right, however Levy (or someone) recently came out and said wages were running at something like 55% of turnover up a couple of % from previous seasons (something in the 50%s anyway; not sounding very up on this am I? ) Anyway our accounts should be published shortly so we'll find out the truth then...

Yeah, it's just an interesting one because there's obviously a big pressure internally which is hitting your wage structure, but you've also got the need to have a squad which will consistently challenge for CL football. It's fascinating watching Levy handle it because you're obviously a well run club off the pitch but are in that position where if you move too far forward and not get the CL revenue then you'll risk it starting a spiral which will knock you back again. If you can keep it capped at where it's at currently then it'll offer some hope to other clubs that they can push for top 4 properly without having to hit £100m in wages every season. I guess the question is whether you can consistently get top 4 football without doing it yourselves though. 55% would mean something like £20m off the wage bill so that would seem reasonable with the players out, but it's still close to a 10% increase over where you were before. Nuts really that footballers keep seeing these kind of increases while everyone else is lucky to see any sort of increase.

looking at it a little more closely, I'm actually not that sure that levy wasn't just firing a message across redknapp's bows, and trying to manage expectations. as spurs bulging squad was already in place, and they didn't really add all that much to it on qualification to the cl.

As you pointed out, there were new contracts for modric and bale, and a two year extension for ledley king, which is unlikely to have gone up at all. But they only bought sandro (not exactly a huge earner I would have thought) Gallas, and van der vaart on the last day of the season. Pienaar came in on fairly big wages in the middle of the season, and they bought khumalo at the same time. and they signed pleitekosa on loan.

It's difficult to see where most of the spike came from. But the thing was they only let a couple of reserve players go. It must have been very difficult to work with redknapp as a manager. He was always saying stupid things like he needed more players, while not using half of the ones he had, under any circumstances, and going on about how they should give luka modric a new contract etc. Completely irresponsible stuff for the manager of any club to be coming out with. And all the while you're wondering about where the new extension to harry's house came from, while grimly aware that he left west ham, portsmouth and southampton all on the brink of insolvency.

You allude to spurs being able to actually improve their league position while trimming the squad in 2011-12, but that is testament to how much waste spurs actually were carrying at the time. I've mentioned before that spurs were carrying an entire team of players on first team wages, that harry never ever used, but that's after the post cl clear out. They were able to finance this summers rebuilding out of cannibalizing that group, and selling modric. there's still another five or six players that they are desperately keen to be shot of. including a number of the most highly paid players at the club. And it's not as though they really replaced the players that they got rid of in the summer or 2010-11, they just let them go.

I suppose it's not just a question of reducing numbers, but there's also a substitution effect going on, as the changing age composition, and balance of the team is also working in spurs' favour. levy must love working with A V-b. He's not going to turn up in his office on the last day of the transfer window saying I want to sign a player the wrong side of thirty, with huge wage expectations like Parker, or van der vaart (I know) or friedel or gallas, or even adebayor. He wants to get rid of the players that Levy wants to get rid of, and replace them with younger players, who happen to be paid less, and will increase in value.

i'd be surprised if there was that much upward pressure on their wages this summer either, as they seem to have primarily being shipping out big earning older players, over paid squad players on first team wages, and replacing them with a smaller number of first team players who aren't yet on the top rung of wages, and padding out the squad with younger players like caulker, naughton and townsend. The substitution effect is going to be their friend there I think.

only the permanent signing of adebayor, and the late addition of dempsey, caused by the failure to get deals for moutinho and damiao sorted out stick out. A v-b has limited use for gomes, friedel, gallas, dawson, huddlestone, livermore, bentley and jenas, and possibly parker. These players aren't up to playing his system, indeed I'm not sure what the arrival of holtby means for Dempsey, who hasn't really been pulling up any trees either. Some of these players are on fairly substantial wages, by the standards of spurs, and selling them will ease pressure on the wage bill without necessarily weakening the team. Even the er, controversial signing of fryers to replace one of gallas/dawson or assou ekotto would point down that route. But a lot of the low hanging fruit is gone, and they're going to struggle to keep things down once they get to the end of the substitution effect. Fortunately for them, the new tv contract should help them keep things under control

 

[colin fishwick]

One League Cup, No new Stadium.

On Balance below par. But still much, much better than Sugar .

 

[braineclipse]

Lets not act as if he's infallible in the transfer market.
He's made huge losses on some brick buys.

Who is acting as if he's infallible?

When did infallibility become the yardstick?

 

[DubaiSpur]

One League Cup, No new Stadium.

On Balance below par. But still much, much better than Sugar .

One League Cup, one run to the quarter-finals of the Champions League, world-class new training ground.

None of our rivals (the ones with access to comparable resources; Everton, Villa, Saudi Sportswashing Machine (after the Robson years)) have done anything remotely close. Everton got dumped out of the CL in the qualifying round, then never went near it again, Villa spent crazy amounts of money (more than us, incidentally) on utter dross, and Saudi Sportswashing Machine squandered every single advantage they had over us when Levy first came in and ended up getting relegated. And all of their training grounds pale in comparison to our apparently best-in-the-league new facility.

He's made mistakes, but there is not a chairman in the world I would trust our limited resources to more than Levy. He's managed to get us competing with the oil-rich, CL-funded clubs on a fraction of their budgets. Not something to be sniffed at.

 

[Gazza Dazzla]

One League Cup, No new Stadium.

On Balance below par. But still much, much better than Sugar .

Incredible! Below par hey? What exactly is par for you? Bareing in mind, utd, Liverpool and arsenal were all established CL clubs when levy came in and that Chelsea and city won the lottery, so 5 clubs should be ahead of us and winning the trophies, yet we've been pretty much 4th/5th since mid 2000's. We have probably the best training ground in the world, an excellant academy that just dingdonged the lauded barca 4-0 at their place and we're pretty much starting work on a new 60k seater stadium..

On what planet is that below par?

 

[jimmyb]

One League Cup, No new Stadium.

On Balance below par. But still much, much better than Sugar .

Yeah, 'cos he inherited the club when the team was at such a high level and there were no clubs that were already miles ahead, on and off the pitch and no others subsequently won the oil lottery..........and stadiums are easy to come by, right?

 

[Yermiyahu]

Incredible! Below par hey? What exactly is par for you? Bareing in mind, utd, Liverpool and arsenal were all established CL clubs when levy came in and that Chelsea and city won the lottery, so 5 clubs should be ahead of us and winning the trophies, yet we've been pretty much 4th/5th since mid 2000's. We have probably the best training ground in the world, an excellant academy that just dingdonged the lauded barca 4-0 at their place and we're pretty much starting work on a new 60k seater stadium..

On what planet is that below par?

This 1000 times!