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What if Sol Campbel decided to stay at Spurs?

S

spitshine

Sebastien Bassong
Like the majority I felt betrayed and sick that he would string us along and then up and go to our bitter rivals coupled with no transfer fee,
made it a living hell. Judas he was and Judas he shall forever remain. Broke my heart, trust in footballers and showed there was no loyalty whatsoever.

But for him, what if he made the right decision in our eyes eyes and stayed with us, would we have been a better team and
won more cups, maybe challenging for a champions league place earlier? You would think him and Ledley would have been a fantastic partnership for years to come but we had a lot of crap during those days as well, Doherty, Chris Perry, Ben Thatcher, Sherwood to name a few.

This is an emotive subject and probably we all only think about the treachery and would have been less affected had he gone to Man U or abroad as we thought he was going to do. On a footballing level, considering the players we had at the time, I don't believe we would have been more successful had he stayed for those 5 seasons he spent at Woolwich.
 
spitshine said:
Like the majority I felt betrayed and sick that he would string us along and then up and go to our bitter rivals coupled with no transfer fee,
made it a living hell. Judas he was and Judas he shall forever remain. Broke my heart, trust in footballers and showed there was no loyalty whatsoever.

But for him, what if he made the right decision in our eyes eyes and stayed with us, would we have been a better team and
won more cups, maybe challenging for a champions league place earlier? You would think him and Ledley would have been a fantastic partnership for years to come but we had a lot of crap during those days as well, Doherty, Chris Perry, Ben Thatcher, Sherwood to name a few.

This is an emotive subject and probably we all only think about the treachery and would have been less affected had he gone to Man U or abroad as we thought he was going to do. On a footballing level, considering the players we had at the time, I don't believe we would have been more successful had he stayed for those 5 seasons he spent at Woolwich.
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I don't think we would have been too much better, we still had all kinds of crap in that period (though having a defender of that ability is never going to hurt you).

I'm not sure I'm speaking for others here but I didn't even care that he wanted to leave. I completely agreed that it was the right decision to leave, he was 26. If he had been honest from the beginning, allowed us to get a transfer fee and had gone to Man utd, Barcelona, Inter, whatever. Just about any team in the world except for Arsenal.

What he did was scummy though.
 
Perhaps King wouldn't have been given the space and support to emerge in the way he was allowed to?

Perhaps he would have got fed up of always being second fiddle and moved on, like say happened with Rossi at United?
 
Gutter Boy said:
Perhaps King wouldn't have been given the space and support to emerge in the way he was allowed to?

Perhaps he would have got fed up of always being second fiddle and moved on, like say happened with Rossi at United?
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Agree with this. Who knows how King would have developed? So difficult to really understand what could have happened. As we have seen last season, its such fine margins. Had Messi, Robben scored their pens. Had Defoe scored v City. Or Ledley not conceded the pen. Or Foy not been such a ****. Or we had just beaten Villa as we should have, or had Fulop not been such a brick keeper. Such such fine margins.

Point is, Sol was a fantastic player regardless of him being a ****. But it's pretty much impossible to know how it would have panned out. But I guess that's not the point of the thread, it's just hypothetical... I'd hazard a guess to something similar to what hootnow said.
 
It's a way of trying to understand if at all we would achieved more with him there during those barren years and also thinking if Ben Thatcher had gone to Woolwich
would we still be hating him as much? I think not because some believe that Campbell who we nurtured and being the star man, would lead us to something greater than what we were achieving at the time
 
We may have had one of the best defensive partnerships the Premier League has seen. Campbell for his physicality and presence and King with his anticipation and clean technique would have been a formidable pairing.
 
Dayo said:
Is this thread a way of saying we all secretly still love him?
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I dont hate anybody in life apart this one cretinous lump of brick, everytime I see his smug face on the tv I want to kick it in

I will hate him to his and my dying day, the bloke is a ****
 
It's an interesting question. He would have been just one player, but you could get a domino effect. We might not have spent £8m on Richards and used the money for a position of need. This key player. along with Campbell and King developing into a great partnership, could have led us into contention for challenging the top four a few years earlier. Perhaps this would have been enough for Carrick to stay and so on.

We could equally ask what if Comolli hadn't persuaded Levy that Zokora was the man and Carrick had got the new contract he wanted. Then we would have added Berbatov to the 2005-06 team and probably avoided those poor years. Jol might have stayed on and built, but would he have been able to do what Redknapp did?

With hindsight, it's easy to see the setbacks and create better scenarios, but we don't know what alternative setbacks might have occurred. Regardless, I think this sort of thread is a fun exercise.
 
jts1882 said:
It's an interesting question. He would have been just one player, but you could get a domino effect. We might not have spent £8m on Richards and used the money for a position of need. This key player. along with Campbell and King developing into a great partnership, could have led us into contention for challenging the top four a few years earlier. Perhaps this would have been enough for Carrick to stay and so on.

We could equally ask what if Comolli hadn't persuaded Levy that Zokora was the man and Carrick had got the new contract he wanted. Then we would have added Berbatov to the 2005-06 team and probably avoided those poor years. Jol might have stayed on and built, but would he have been able to do what Redknapp did?

With hindsight, it's easy to see the setbacks and create better scenarios, but we don't know what alternative setbacks might have occurred. Regardless, I think this sort of thread is a fun exercise.
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Interesting you mention Richards. I think his very sad illness effected us just as much as Campbell's departure. Richards and King could have become an equally domineering partnership.
 
Yes, but the difference is Sol was nurtured from young, captain and fabric of the team and with us for nearly a decade. The others were not there even half as long. He would have stayed those 5 seasons and probably at best ended up with a league cup medal. If he stayed, I doubt he was the kind of player that good foreigners looking at an english club to sign for, would mention. So it took more than 3 seasons until we started to have some class players in our team.
 
markysimmo said:
I dont hate anybody in life apart this one cretinous lump of brick, everytime I see his smug face on the tv I want to kick it in

I will hate him to his and my dying day, the bloke is a ****
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All of this. Thinks he's the victim too. fudging **** of a human being wouldn't wish death on anyone else.

To answer your question yes we would've been better obviously.
 
Honestly couldnt give a fudge about sol campbell any more. He's dead to me, wasting energy and time even typing my little two cents in this little box on the Internet will not change the fact he's a **** for what he did.

The only grace ill give him is, he was young and foolish. Apologising would help, some small shred of decency perhaps. But frankly, he's a cautionary tale I will tell my children about, how not to treat people like they are ****s is a big lesson for the future generations. I hope I never get put in a nasty position but having principles and being a man is important. From my perspective his errors have guided me in how not to behave as a professional and continue to do so in a small way.

Nothing more to it
 
AS much as weakening us (considering his ability and no transfer fee) it strengthened the goons (a free top player). Considering they are our rivals for ECL then perhaps him not leaving would have made a huge impact. Players do make a difference - if we had let Bale go to Forest, etc...
 
Gutter Boy said:
Perhaps King wouldn't have been given the space and support to emerge in the way he was allowed to?

Perhaps he would have got fed up of always being second fiddle and moved on, like say happened with Rossi at United?
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I very much agree with this thought. King himself said that it was Naybet who made him excel the way he did (or something like that), and who knows if he would have been brought on to the club if we weren't in the situation we were. As I remember, for all the player Campbell was, he wasn't the smartest, but a very physical player with fantastic aerial ability and great pace for someone his size. Would or could he have nurtured King to the player he became? I for one don't think so, I don't think he possessed the required skillset. We actually had quite a lot of promising prospects around that time, Gardner and Thelwell off the top of my head, and King could easily have gone the same route without proper guidance.

In hindsight it's easy to say that we could have had the best CB pairing in the league, but I don't think it would happen even if he had stayed. And there were so many if's and but's around and before 2000 where we drew the shortest straw it's unreal. Now if we had gotten Bergkamp and Petit like we coulda-shoulda it would have done much more than losing Campbell, for instance. I also fully agree with those who says it's not the transfer, not even to Arsenal, that makes him the Judas he was. It was the charades, the lying, the backstabbing of the club where he selfishly pocketed what the club could have gotten in fees from which we could have replaced or strengthened, and the "undying loyalty" to Spurs he proclaimed only weeks before going on a free. We all knew he would leave eventually, but the ugly process is what separates him from say Sheringham, Carrick, Berbatov and Modric.
 
It wasn't what he did, it was how he did it.

He had every right to leave. The late 90's and early 2000's were arguably the worst periods the club has been through in the last thirty years, and a player as talented as he was couldn't possibly have advanced his career in those circumstances.

But to screw us out of a signing fee we badly needed....to cravenly lie with an open grin when asked repeatedly if he would be staying....to sit there in a newsroom and deny any chance of him ever going to Arsenal....and then to screw an entire generation of Spurs fans by doing exactly that, and exposing all his utterances over the previous year or so as nothing more than the blackest, most two-faced bile.....to leave us without a single cent, without our best defender, and with the knowledge that he lied, twisted, squirmed and plotted his way out of Spurs with almost villainous intent.....

To this day he bleats that he did nothing wrong, and denigrates the club at almost every turn, pointing to his trophy haul as proof of his good judgement.

He could have won the same things at United, at Juve, at fudging Madrid....all of whom apparently wanted him. But fair enough, he chose Arsenal. he could have informed the club of his intentions, so they could receive a fee for him. But he didn't. He could have told the fans where he was going, could have come clean, and taken the momentary opprobrium. But he didn't. He could at least have cut the flimflam about new contracts and staying because his heart was in it, but he didn't.

He could have joined fudging Arsenal but told the fans that he was going to do so. If he did, half of the current hatred that exists towards him would not be present, because at least he was honest.

He was our best defender, and who knows what would have happened had he stayed. He could have been honest, and at least been grudgingly accepted after all these years. But he did neither of these things, he exposed himself as the human fraud he so blatently was, and the hatred he continues to engender is proof of just how many people he hurt with his actions all those years ago.

I'm sad it had to end that way. But because it did end that way, there is no reason to speculate on what could have been. There is far too much anger around this issue to expect any lasting contributions to this debate.
 
I think even if he did say he was going to Woolwich, the anger would still be there. Anyway, no sane footballer who knows the rivalry would ever say In public I'm leaving spurs and going down the road to play for them. In speculating had he stayed has made me think I couldn't see how our fortunes would have improved enough to make a difference.
 
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