Daniel Levy - Chairman

[milo]

When players are signed late in the transfer window presumably for financial reasons ahead of getting them in earlier and giving them a pre season with the club I would say that stance is wrong and an example of money ruling over the football side.

It's easy to make a counter argument that there is only limited funds available for transfers and that signing players earlier in the window would mean less signings and that having a negative impact on the football side.

The truth is, that this is not a black and white issue and that there are loads of other factors that are also in play.

 

[Baleforce]

So, yet again.... In comparison to the clubs we think we are competing against we underpay.

and the argument has come full circle, I think some of those clubs overpay

 

[parklane1]

you keep on saying under pay but I’d argue they all over pay
Maybe we get great value
As I’ve said numerous times the “under paid players” haven’t won a trophy here and not many had won anything of note before hand
So maybe their pay is right and fair
Doesn’t mean we can afford what others pay which is what I think your arguing by that’s not under paying.

Are Juve under paying Ramsey?
Are Madrid under paying Bale?

I hear some suggest that we do not compete for wages with the clubs we are in competition with. Well has i have said a couple of times in this thread that is not a fair comparison, how are we expected to compete with the money doped clubs ( City, Chelski) or one of the richest clubs in the world Utd.

I think it is a little unfair to suggest that we should as its not a level playing field, now we have the stadium up and running ( and the added income that will provide) i would expect/hope us to do so but until then its like compering apples to pears.

 

[Baleforce]

No one over pays or under pays as there isn't a standard pay structure across leagues/europe that can be referenced.

We pay the wages we negotiate with the players and their agents, same as any other club.

I see that point, maybe mine would be better made if I said that other teams are paying high wages to players from who they could get the same level of performance from players on lower wages, whereas, we tend to start at a more "reasonable" level then increase based on performance and market value.

 

[Finney Is Back]

No one over pays or under pays as there isn't a standard pay structure across leagues/europe that can be referenced.

We pay the wages we negotiate with the players and their agents, same as any other club.

Indeed. We pay the 6th highest wages in the league.... and win nothing.
The 5 clubs who all spend lots more than we do on wages win 3.2 major trophies a year as a combined average.

From the above it's clear that we have got our wages bang on and what is actually happening is that those 5 clubs who are more successful than us are all silly sausages overpaying!

 

[parklane1]

Indeed. We pay the 6th highest wages in the league.... and win nothing.
The 5 clubs who all spend lots more than we do on wages win 3.2 major trophies a year as a combined average.

From the above it's clear that we have got our wages bang on and what is actually happening is that those 5 clubs who are more successful than us are all silly sausages overpaying!

Or that some of them are money doped so are able to do so

 

[Finney Is Back]

you keep on saying under pay but I’d argue they all over pay
Maybe we get great value
As I’ve said numerous times the “under paid players” haven’t won a trophy here and not many had won anything of note before hand
So maybe their pay is right and fair
Doesn’t mean we can afford what others pay which is what I think your arguing by that’s not under paying.

Are Juve under paying Ramsey?
Are Madrid under paying Bale?

Ah I see now. You are arguing that we pay our existing players the right money. I would tend to agree with you that we do for the most part.

I was looking at it from a different perspective. Do we underpay for our playing squad compared to the teams we want to compete with? Our wage bill compared to those clubs can only suggest that we do. Underpaying means you bring in an NJie instead of a Mane. Did we underpay NJie himself? No, if anything we probably overpaid him, but what we did was underpay for the position itself within the team and took a second (third?... fourth?!?) rate player instead of the player proven in the premier league who would've improved us.

If we take individual players out of this and even take comparative turnovers out of this to try to ascertain a level playing field in comparison to revenues; it is generally considered that a sensible and sustainable level of spend on wages as a percentage of turnover is 55%. Most clubs in England operate at, or beyond this, including the other members of the big 6. We have been operating a wage bill at a level of only 40% of turnover however. That absolutely suggests that we are underpaying for our playing squad, perhaps we pay the players that happen to be in that squad the right or even too much money, but the underpaying means that it is difficult to strengthen the squad with players good enough to allow us to really compete for the trophies.

 

[billyiddo]

Indeed. We pay the 6th highest wages in the league.... and win nothing.
The 5 clubs who all spend lots more than we do on wages win 3.2 major trophies a year as a combined average.

From the above it's clear that we have got our wages bang on and what is actually happening is that those 5 clubs who are more successful than us are all silly sausages overpaying!

Up until the last year the 5 clubs who spent more than us on wages had significantly greater turnovers so I'm not sure what you're getting at with this particular issue.

 

[Bishop]

But you are saying that without knowing any details of those moments in time.

It really does boil down to whether you trust Levy implicitly or you dont?

'Maximise' is really saying, push the boat out, go beyond what we can afford or our budget, as the (potential) rewards will out weigh it?

Its emotive.

Levy doesn't do emotion. If we couldn't afford a deal (fee,wages whatever) we dont do it. That doesn't make him guilty unless you dont trust the way he operates.

He could equally say 'the (potential) downsides would financially destabilise us'.

There have been times where we probably have had the money and not getting the deal over the line in time has been more to do with the complicated nature of transfer negotiations. Levy's fault?

You implicitly trust Levy to make the smart and correct decisions in all cases it seems. I do not based on evidence from the past. No man is infallible and I don't understand your desire to prove him so.

No maximise does not mean go beyond our budget, I've never argued for this so please don't put words into my mouth. It means do things within our budget in a timely manner. But at the end of the day this is a football team and the point is to win on the football pitch not on the spreadsheet, eventually that is where the real work must be done.

I presume from your answer you think that every single time a deal has not come off it has bean purely that we could not afford that player at all and not because the club decided they did not think a deal was cost effective or matched their own valuation (which is perfectly fine btw)?

Did we not buy Suarez in 2011 because we couldn't afford the deal or because we decided against making the move. The answer is the latter (and I don't blame Levy for that one, it's just a very well known example of a deal that did not happen despite the financials being available.

Up until the last year the 5 clubs who spent more than us on wages had significantly greater turnovers so I'm not sure what you're getting at with this particular issue.

The arguement he is making is that relative to turnover we underpay. Forget absolute figures in terms of percentages we have absolutely apportioned a lower amount of our turnover towards player wages. The latest figures show that we paid 39% of our turnover as player wages. The next lowest figure in the Top 6 were Manchester United at 50% with the rest of the top 6 group in-between that figure and 60%.

So it is not debatable that we pay less as a percentage of turnover, now we can question how much of that is linked to the infrastructure builds and I would imagine a good amount of cautiousness from Levy would be connected to the overall financial demands.

I would though mention that we have very consistently paid the lowest percentage of wages vs turnover for the last 13 years. So can we say that this approach is linked purely to the stadium and training centre builds or an accurate reflection of Levy's consistent and existing business model. I would lean towards the latter. Which again is fine, but he will and should receive criticism when it doesn't quite work out.

 

[glasgowspur]

you keep on saying under pay but I’d argue they all over pay
Maybe we get great value
As I’ve said numerous times the “under paid players” haven’t won a trophy here and not many had won anything of note before hand
So maybe their pay is right and fair
Doesn’t mean we can afford what others pay which is what I think your arguing by that’s not under paying.

Are Juve under paying Ramsey?
Are Madrid under paying Bale?

So if we are paying them the going rate for second best isn't that what we should expect.
Not having a dig at you there, but I think a lot of this is silly. None of this is directly relatable across clubs imo. If you have a choice between us and city, city will pay more, doesn't make you a better player.

 

[Bedfordspurs]

So if we are paying them the going rate for second best isn't that what we should expect.
Not having a dig at you there, but I think a lot of this is silly. None of this is directly relatable across clubs imo. If you have a choice between us and city, city will pay more, doesn't make you a better player.

Yeah i agree
What a player gets paid doesn’t correlate to ability
It comes down to what a club is willing to pay
look at Leicester and palace with their stars paying more to keep them
Doesn’t make those players actually any better than one on half the money

 

[ricky2tricky4city]

You implicitly trust Levy to make the smart and correct decisions in all cases it seems. I do not based on evidence from the past. No man is infallible and I don't understand your desire to prove him so.

I implicitly trust Levy to do his job, he makes hundreds of decisions every year, some of those decisions will be wrong, some will not be liked, some will be hard but he will get a lot of them right Inc the hard and not liked ones.
And all those decisions add up to where we are now. If you think we should be higher,richer, stronger, more successful than we are and Levy has hindered that through his decisions then it's you that are asking him to be perfect.

No maximise does not mean go beyond our budget, I've never argued for this so please don't put words into my mouth.

Hence the question mark at the end of my sentence.

 

[Bishop]

I implicitly trust Levy to do his job, he makes hundreds of decisions every year, some of those decisions will be wrong, some will not be liked, some will be hard but he will get a lot of them right Inc the hard and not liked ones.
And all those decisions add up to where we are now. If you think we should be higher,richer, stronger, more successful than we are and Levy has hindered that through his decisions then it's you that are asking him to be perfect.

Hence the question mark at the end of my sentence.

Doing better doesn't mean doing it perfectly. I want him to do better, as I want the players and managers to do better. I openly admit I have high standards for Spurs but it is what it is.

 

[ricky2tricky4city]

Doing better doesn't mean doing it perfectly. I want him to do better, as I want the players and managers to do better. I openly admit I have high standards for Spurs but it is what it is.

Oh I know you do.

As for Levy (as has been talked about earlier today in the thread), the moment to pay more wages, have bigger transfer budgets and more clout to get deals sown up early by virtue of being richer and more powerful are well and truly upon us. So it appears that those gripes people have with him, whether valid or not, he now has the chance to operate how they desire (but probably how he intended all along once we got to this stage)

 

[Bedfordspurs]

Ah I see now. You are arguing that we pay our existing players the right money. I would tend to agree with you that we do for the most part.

I was looking at it from a different perspective. Do we underpay for our playing squad compared to the teams we want to compete with? Our wage bill compared to those clubs can only suggest that we do. Underpaying means you bring in an NJie instead of a Mane. Did we underpay NJie himself? No, if anything we probably overpaid him, but what we did was underpay for the position itself within the team and took a second (third?... fourth?!?) rate player instead of the player proven in the premier league who would've improved us.

If we take individual players out of this and even take comparative turnovers out of this to try to ascertain a level playing field in comparison to revenues; it is generally considered that a sensible and sustainable level of spend on wages as a percentage of turnover is 55%. Most clubs in England operate at, or beyond this, including the other members of the big 6. We have been operating a wage bill at a level of only 40% of turnover however. That absolutely suggests that we are underpaying for our playing squad, perhaps we pay the players that happen to be in that squad the right or even too much money, but the underpaying means that it is difficult to strengthen the squad with players good enough to allow us to really compete for the trophies.

That number is fluid don’t forget
We don’t qualify for the CL and turnover drops dramatically and that ratio changes

 

[Bullet]

Note we have had 50* sliding doors moments during Levy's tenure.

25* times Spurs got it right (e.g. signing Bale, VdV, Modric, Defoe, Crouch's goal to put us in the CL for the first time, great CL moments like City and Ajax games etc)
25* times Spurs got it wrong (e.g. not signing Suarez, Aguero, Mane, that game against City when Bale and Defoe didn't score and Balotelli stood on Parker's head, losing to Pompey, the CL final etc)

Some fans focus on the good, some fans focus on the bad. Overall it has been good.

*Made up numbers but you get the point

 

[glasgowspur]

Note we have had 50* sliding doors moments during Levy's tenure.

25* times Spurs got it right (e.g. signing Bale, VdV, Modric, Defoe, Crouch's goal to put us in the CL for the first time, great CL moments like City and Ajax games etc)
25* times Spurs got it wrong (e.g. not signing Suarez, Aguero, Mane, that game against City when Bale and Defoe didn't score and Balotelli stood on Parker's head, losing to Pompey, the CL final etc)

Some fans focus on the good, some fans focus on the bad. Overall it has been good.

*Made up numbers but you get the point

The good times could have been better, the bad times could have been worse, its called life.

 

[ricky2tricky4city]

The good times could have been better, the bad times could have been worse, its called life.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…

 

[Bishop]

The good times could have been better, the bad times could have been worse, its called life.

This is very fair.

 

[Bedfordspurs]

Thing that always makes me laugh is when fans say he should be sacked.... he owns the club and ain’t gonna sack himself (joe lewis is a silent a partner as you could ever get)