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ENIC

MartyFunkhouser said:
Hindsight Hotspurs FC
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This, and everything is obvious in hindsight, and memories revise history.

The real question is what is our strategy moving forward?

- We are betting on this manager, so what are we going to do in January to support him?
- We have a good youth system now, with 3 or 4 that might have a legitimate shot, how do we develop them and ensure that some make the final step
- Is the future more PL buys or do we supplement that with looking for the next Modric, Eriksen, Berbatov, even VDV?
- How do we sort out the who we keep of Gray, Bergvall, Maddison, Gallagher, Xavi, Deki, Odobert, Solanke, Richi (last one obvious but lots of players we need to make decisions on next summer)
 
robp135 said:
Had we sold Dier for £50M in 2027, Rose for £50M in 2018 and Dele for £80M in 2019 what would the reaction of the fan base been?
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I mean it doesn't really matter what the reaction would have been, all that matters is if the result of those moves would have seen us progress.

The trouble is that we know we got close and then eventually tailed off so any move suggested in hindsight is seen as the missing piece of the jigsaw when in all reality we could have just as easily sold those players and regressed all the same. Then the argument would be we should have kept that team together and done XY or Z instead.


For me the issues from that period are more to do with the transfer department as a whole being threadbare, rather than any particular deal or sale being the difference maker. We had the stadium build going on which meant transfer business was going to need to be balanced for a fair while, fair enough - but we would have known this ahead of time and should have planned accordingly, indepth knowledge of the market and supplement an already top quality team with lesser known players that command less of a fee. I guess we did try to do that, but we didn't have the setup in place to find the right players. I feel like we gave Poch the power in the market that he deserved, having earned his crust over several seasons, but it came at a time that we couldn't pursue his primary targets and so were left scrambling around with Hitchens little black book.
 
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Baleforce said:
Look at those 3 players though, there hasn't been a CM in the entire game even half as good as Modric since he left, there hasn't been an MF anywhere near as good as Eriksen in the PL since he left, and there has never been, before or after, a PL forward as good as Harry Kane.

That is 3 players it was impossible to have a succession plan for.
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When you think two of them played in the same team is it any wonder Poch team struggled badly when they went off the boil, got injured.
Add in similar with Toby, dele and Wanyama, it's shocking we the fans couldn't show more patience.
 
billyiddo said:
I mean it doesn't really matter what the reaction would have been, all that matters is if the result of those moves would have seen us progress.

The trouble is that we know we got close and then eventually tailed off so any move suggested in hindsight is seen as the missing piece of the jigsaw when in all reality we could have just as easily sold those players and regressed all the same. Then the argument would be we should have kept that team together and done XY or Z instead.


For me the issues from that period are more to do with the transfer department as a whole being threadbare, rather than any particular deal or sale being the difference maker. We had the stadium build going on which meant transfer business was going to need to be balanced for a fair while, fair enough - but we would have known this ahead of time and should have planned accordingly, indepth knowledge of the market and supplement an already top quality team with lesser known players that command less of a fee. I guess we did try to do that, but we didn't have the setup in place to find the right players. I feel like we gave Poch the power in the market that he deserved, having earned his crust over several seasons, but it came at a time that we couldn't pursue his primary targets and so were left scrambling around with Hitchens little black book.
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We sold Walker and signed Aurier
We sold Dembele and signed Ndombele
We sold Eriksen and Lo Celso was in place
We sold Kane and signed Solanke
 
robp135 said:
We sold Walker and signed Aurier
We sold Dembele and signed Ndombele
We sold Eriksen and Lo Celso was in place
We sold Kane and signed Solanke
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Before that though we sold carrick and bought berba. We sold berba and bought modric. Bale, wslker, rose etc... came in along the way.

We used to be great at player trading. We are terrible now.

We need a great dof. More than anything.
 
Lilbaz said:
Before that though we sold carrick and bought berba. We sold berba and bought modric. Bale, wslker, rose etc... came in along the way.

We used to be great at player trading. We are terrible now.

We need a great dof. More than anything.
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Zakora was the Carrick replacment.
Pavlyauchenko was the Berbatov replacement.
Dembele was the Modric replacement.
 
robp135 said:
Had we sold Dier for £50M in 2027, Rose for £50M in 2018 and Dele for £80M in 2019 what would the reaction of the fan base been?
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I’m sure there would have been a lot of unease and potentially anger. Although my argument would be that we needed to have the confidence in a football strategy that made sense relative to our financial power at the time, and not be guided by things like the fan reaction. (Not saying you are saying this)

I think it also depends on how we replaced them. Part of the issue through the years was replacing Carrick with Zokora, Modric with Dembele, Bale with Lamela, and Berbatov with Campbell. In the case of losing Carrick, we replaced the guy who made us tick with a completely different style of player, which then made Jol’s job harder. Berbatov with Campbell, the issue there is obvious (the argument may be that Pav was the Berba replacement and an example of good succession planning the prior window, but we are talking fan reaction here). Modric for Dembele, the issue is not Dembele, who was a great player just different to Modric, the issue is that we didn’t get Moutinho. I don’t have as much criticism of how we used the Bale money, because I think we reacted quickly and as smartly as we could once the deal became impossible to resist, although there would be an argument there that we could have gone for 1 or 2 top class proven talents rather than spreading the risk around the squad, with each player unproven in the PL.

Overall point being, if we replaced top players with top players, I think the fan angst dissipates pretty quickly. If we remain consistent in the league and actually evolve in interesting ways while still demonstrating our core values, it becomes moot. If we replaced them with unproven players, and started to fall in the league, the fan angst would be justified.

As it was, I think Levy could argue that the CL final run was the result of him keeping that squad together as long as he could. Because he got as many of them to peak as close together as possible and that is something he was never able to achieve prior. And I have some sympathy for that argument, because our players used their collective nous and belief in each other to earn some incredible results in that run. I think my counter to that would be, that the squad wasn’t truly peaking, it was more scraping by in knock out football. Our peak was probably in 2017. And ultimately it made the rebuild harder, because we left ourselves to do more at once when it became clear it was the end for that group.
 
robp135 said:
Zakora was the Carrick replacment.
Pavlyauchenko was the Berbatov replacement.
Dembele was the Modric replacement.
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Not how it worked then. We sold carrick for €27m. Bought berba and zakora for €27m


We sold berba for €38m and bought modric and pav for €39m.

 
Lilbaz said:
Not how it worked then. We sold carrick for €27m. Bought berba and zakora for €27m


We sold berba for €38m and bought modric and pav for €39m.

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I think you’re right that we were pretty good on player trading, I’d say for a 10 year or so period from 2005/2006 through to the 16/17 season. I think we exploited our place as the best of the rest team. We became a destination for players to develop into their peak form, and ultimately there was a steady line of progress through that time.

I think the game started changing. The wage structure didn’t work when teams like Villa would pay to attract good players and become a destination in their own right. And same with transfer fees.

Also I’d say we continued to bring in good players, but had a lot of false starts because we didn’t have a clear football strategy. Zokora was the replacement for Carrick meant we then had to transition away from Jol. AVB with no Modric or Moutinho meant we never got to see his real idea of football. I think we could have done even better if we stayed more with a consistent football idea. There was consistency in the sense we often went for great British players or those that had room to grow, but it felt like an investment strategy, not a football strategy. And it still got us pretty far and consistently top 6 for so many years. The question is whether we could have done more.
 
robp135 said:
This Summers strategy was the correct one. Moving forward we should be signing 1-2 elite players in positions of need along with some young players who are either ready to compete for minutes or get loaned.
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But will we? I've thought that so many times over the years. I even compared how many players Pool buy to us at one point. It didn't make good reading.

That annual cadence of 1 in January and a couple in the summer feels good to me.
 
billyiddo said:
I mean it doesn't really matter what the reaction would have been, all that matters is if the result of those moves would have seen us progress.

The trouble is that we know we got close and then eventually tailed off so any move suggested in hindsight is seen as the missing piece of the jigsaw when in all reality we could have just as easily sold those players and regressed all the same. Then the argument would be we should have kept that team together and done XY or Z instead.


For me the issues from that period are more to do with the transfer department as a whole being threadbare, rather than any particular deal or sale being the difference maker. We had the stadium build going on which meant transfer business was going to need to be balanced for a fair while, fair enough - but we would have known this ahead of time and should have planned accordingly, indepth knowledge of the market and supplement an already top quality team with lesser known players that command less of a fee. I guess we did try to do that, but we didn't have the setup in place to find the right players. I feel like we gave Poch the power in the market that he deserved, having earned his crust over several seasons, but it came at a time that we couldn't pursue his primary targets and so were left scrambling around with Hitchens little black book.
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I think it was more complex than that.

It was about choice. We went 2 consecutive seasons breaking the record for profit. Whilst Levy said that the stadium and football operations were mutually exclusive they clearly weren't. We gave a big chunk of tax on profit to HMRC and you got the feeling that we were dressing the company up as a profitable organisation to get the low interest on the loan for the stadium that we eventually got. The other anomaly was Levy telling us that the club's expectations was to have CL when the stadium opened. We then got it prior and made a big chunk of money that therefore wasn't in his forecast but that didn't realise itself as money back to Poch as the net spending was close to zero. That is, until after the final when Levy released some meaningful transfer kitty.

So the story really is about overspending on the stadium, particularly the cost of the delayed go-live. It is perhaps about getting the multi-year financial forecasting wrong as well. However, we needed to make that transition as a club and that is the pain we had to live with. We also had a poor recruitment lead / team that didn't seem to execute. We needed that recruitment team to get creative and find more Sons and Tobys. They fired blank after blank.

The sour taste, if there was one, was the condascending chairman statements and the lack of honesty to the fans.
 
Muttley said:
Nice positive contribution to the thread. Well done you :tearsofjoy:
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I couldn't be bothered with the war and peace levels of replies TBH and this is again people trawling over the past to pick at moments to stick the boot into Levy. I stand by the comment, alot of it is obvious in hindsight but those crying and moaning about it can't in part get he timelines right, remember the facts or even know that the rules for player ownership changed. Not sure much of it can be taken seriously
 
Muttley said:
I think it was more complex than that.

It was about choice. We went 2 consecutive seasons breaking the record for profit. Whilst Levy said that the stadium and football operations were mutually exclusive they clearly weren't. We gave a big chunk of tax on profit to HMRC and you got the feeling that we were dressing the company up as a profitable organisation to get the low interest on the loan for the stadium that we eventually got. The other anomaly was Levy telling us that the club's expectations was to have CL when the stadium opened. We then got it prior and made a big chunk of money that therefore wasn't in his forecast but that didn't realise itself as money back to Poch as the net spending was close to zero. That is, until after the final when Levy released some meaningful transfer kitty.

So the story really is about overspending on the stadium, particularly the cost of the delayed go-live. It is perhaps about getting the multi-year financial forecasting wrong as well. However, we needed to make that transition as a club and that is the pain we had to live with. We also had a poor recruitment lead / team that didn't seem to execute. We needed that recruitment team to get creative and find more Sons and Tobys. They fired blank after blank.

The sour taste, if there was one, was the condascending chairman statements and the lack of honesty to the fans.
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He made that statement in 2019, we moved into the new stadium in 2019. Since that point our net spend has increased beyond what it was in old WHL, hugely beyond it.

The books and accounts are there to be seen, in old WHL we spent what we made to near a perfect balancing of the books, frustrating as it might have been, without input from Joe and without Levy being cash right at the time, where people were expecting that money to come from I have no idea.

We released meaningful transfer kitty because of the CL final run because ............ that made us more money AND we were likely to forecast the new stadium because we had been in the ground since April the previous season

The over spend on the stadium has not impacted the way you are making out, we have spent 1.8bn on players since 2016 so infact all the forecasting Levy predicted has been spot on financially, he claimed we would have more to spend when we moved into new WHL and we have, he said all the money would go back into financing players and it has.

As for condescending statements, not really sure thats true, for someone who famously rarely spoke to the press or addressed the fans, his statements were the least of his issues IMO
 
Baleforce said:
I think on Grealish and Fernandes he has been proved right.

They have both been luxury players* whose stats on the defensive side are poor.

*Grealish had one exceptional season at City it must be said, but for 100m, that's nowhere near enough.
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Fernandes has been the stand out player in a poor Utd side for 6 years. Grealish was ours for around £20m - do your research.
 
Baleforce said:
A poor United side, you say it yourself.

Spend that amount of money you should get a player that elevates you to not being poor, imo.

Grealish was not available to us for 20m, Villa pulled the plug due to a take over.
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Grealish pulled out because he felt a mad sense of late loyalty, then added pressure of take over and new contract. We didnt fudge that one despite popular belief
 
MartyFunkhouser said:
He made that statement in 2019, we moved into the new stadium in 2019. Since that point our net spend has increased beyond what it was in old WHL, hugely beyond it.

The books and accounts are there to be seen, in old WHL we spent what we made to near a perfect balancing of the books, frustrating as it might have been, without input from Joe and without Levy being cash right at the time, where people were expecting that money to come from I have no idea.

We released meaningful transfer kitty because of the CL final run because ............ that made us more money AND we were likely to forecast the new stadium because we had been in the ground since April the previous season

The over spend on the stadium has not impacted the way you are making out, we have spent 1.8bn on players since 2016 so infact all the forecasting Levy predicted has been spot on financially, he claimed we would have more to spend when we moved into new WHL and we have, he said all the money would go back into financing players and it has.

As for condescending statements, not really sure thats true, for someone who famously rarely spoke to the press or addressed the fans, his statements were the least of his issues IMO
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Nah, you're putting words in my mouth there. I was talking majorly about the phasing i.e. multi-year forecasting by the club. I was never talking gross or net spend in that context and certainly not the post-stadium years either.


As an approximate guide (in Euros) we went through 5 years of buying 324m and recouping 292m. That's starting the year after Bale left and the famous 7 joined. That's 22m net spend over 5 years at an average of less than £4m per year when you convert back to sterling. Now I know these aren't "all in" numbers as fans don't get to see those but they are good enough for government work. Ironically that 22m euros was less than we actually paid the tax man for the annual profits for 2 consecutive seasons. From memory, I think we broke the PL record for profit.

Then after the CL final we spend about £100m whilst Poch was still in charge of which you have to think that a decent chunk (50%?) was the winnings from that competition.

So I was always left wondering whether we got our phasing right. The market was quite inflated back then with the silly season (Neymar, Dembele, Coutinho, VVD etc) happening around 2018. Our players were worth silly valuations and I still think we did wrong not releasing one or two so we could go again.

Also no fans seem to be down on the stadium build. We had to do it to get to the next level and I think fas genuinely understand what door it opens. It was more about what we could have done in the Poch years for me. That fall from the 86 point, second place glass ceiling was dramatic but not surprising to me.
 
Baleforce said:
A poor United side, you say it yourself.

Spend that amount of money you should get a player that elevates you to not being poor, imo.

Grealish was not available to us for 20m, Villa pulled the plug due to a take over.
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After agreeing a deal to sell to us and then upping the price for him. We walked away.
 
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