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Mauricio Pochettino - Sacked

I indeed was around for the 90s @parklane1 and followed Spurs during half of the 80s.
I remember how mediocre we often were and remember us nearly going out of business.
As a club we have indeed pulled our socks up, and i am grateful for ENIC and Levyt for that.

But we are at a crunch point whereby it remains to be seen whether we are going to be a good business model for ENIC and their investments over the years or a club that can actually consistently WIN honours because we are a good business.
Look how things are down the road, whereby they are a great business but their owner is not much interested in Arsenal succeeding other than in getting top 4. We could easily go the same way.
As i say, i give ENIC a lot of credit but until we start attempting to challenge for the top honours, the jury for me is still out.

You keep bringing the Arsenal situation in the debate but it a completly different set of circumstances ( as some have already pointed out to you but are ignoring that). As for Spurs being at a crunch point i have heard that from some fans for the last several years about how we are progressing ( or not) in their eyes, usually around the time of the transfer windows and its always the same bitch, Levy not backing the manager, he will never build the new stadium, he is only in it for the money etc,etc.

Now you may not have said things like that :eek: but its always the same. Thankfully there are fewer fans who bring these points up then they used to be.
 
My point is that the infrastructure they have allows the owners to keep the dough flowing in; their board allowed Wenger free reign as long as that was happening, they didn't care about on-field stuff beyond making sure the Top 4 money was flowing. If they wanted to they could spend a load to get them back competing at the top and it wouldn't hurt them one bit - if that was their intention. Luckily for us, it's not their intention and in fact Kroneke is using Arsenal as his cash point/cash back-up whilst he ironically builds a new 4/5Bn new stadium for his Rams NFL team.
Again, it could so easily go the same way for us whereby the owners concentrate on the new Real Estate and Hotel/Entertainment complex and give minimal attention to the football beyond just getting top 4.
As i say, time will tell.
The infrastructure they have, allowed (and allows) them to operate a wage bill that is vastly higher than ours. Arsenal were constricted in their spending due to the circumstances that existed when they built their stadium. They Initially found it very difficult to secure the finance to build their stadium and they also had to cope with the credit crunch only a couple of years after their stadium was open, at a time when they were still carrying significant debt.

In what way is Kroenke using Arsenal as a cash point? Does he take significant funds out of Arsenal as dividends or something? (this is a genuine question). I thought that of all the owners in the Premier League it was Levy who was taking out the largest amount of money via his chairman's salary that dwarfs those in the rest of the league?
 
You keep bringing the Arsenal situation in the debate but it a completly different set of circumstances ( as some have already pointed out to you but are ignoring that). As for Spurs being at a crunch point i have heard that from some fans for the last several years about how we are progressing ( or not) in their eyes, usually around the time of the transfer windows and its always the same bitch, Levy not backing the manager, he will never build the new stadium, he is only in it for the money etc,etc.

Now you may not have said things like that :eek: but its always the same. Thankfully there are fewer fans who bring these points up then they used to be.

I think Arsenal is very similar to us: great stadium, making tons of money. But their owner not really prepared to really push Arsenal to the highest honours (remember their board said they were moving to the Emirates so that they can compete not just with Man United here but with the Bayern Munichs in Europe...that's worked out well now and they have had cash reserves for years and aren't even trying to do that now).

When the stadium and complex is finished as others have said the stadium and hotel complex will be very VERY lucrative for our owners. It remains to be seen whether they go down the Arsenal route or not so as i say for me the jury is still out on the ultimate footballing success of their tenure (as opposed to the finacial investment successes).
 
Being regular CL participants, knockouts 2 years out of 3, title chasers - is NOT footballing success?

When we were lower midtable when they came in?

I see you put "remains to be seen.." but the tone of your posts seems very much like you have already decided.
 
I think Arsenal is very similar to us: great stadium, making tons of money. But their owner not really prepared to really push Arsenal to the highest honours (remember their board said they were moving to the Emirates so that they can compete not just with Man United here but with the Bayern Munichs in Europe...that's worked out well now and they have had cash reserves for years and aren't even trying to do that now).

When the stadium and complex is finished as others have said the stadium and hotel complex will be very VERY lucrative for our owners. It remains to be seen whether they go down the Arsenal route or not so as i say for me the jury is still out on the ultimate footballing success of their tenure (as opposed to the finacial investment successes).

As i said in my above post Arsenal are a different situation to us ( and as i said others have tried to point that out to you), but you are determined to convince yourself that the jury is still out on Levy and CO. Fine you are entitled to believe that ( as i said MANY Spurs fans also did at one time) but thankfully most now see that they have brought our club out of the also runs and will continue to do that.

It is sad ( imo) that we are a well run club and among those clubs that are talked about ( by other clubs) as being a top club yet there are still a FEW fans who have to find a reason to doubt our owners.
 
The infrastructure they have, allowed (and allows) them to operate a wage bill that is vastly higher than ours. Arsenal were constricted in their spending due to the circumstances that existed when they built their stadium. They Initially found it very difficult to secure the finance to build their stadium and they also had to cope with the credit crunch only a couple of years after their stadium was open, at a time when they were still carrying significant debt.

In what way is Kroenke using Arsenal as a cash point? Does he take significant funds out of Arsenal as dividends or something? (this is a genuine question). I thought that of all the owners in the Premier League it was Levy who was taking out the largest amount of money via his chairman's salary that dwarfs those in the rest of the league?

There was an article i read whereby Kroenke is building a large new NFL stadium for his Rams team in the States and his business model for Arsenal would have been that he doesn't invest any more than they would generate from CL so he can concentrate his finances on the Rams stadium rebuild. It was said that when he increased his ownership share of Arsenal he could use it as an asset with the banks for taking out his loans or something to that effect. Basically, the cash reserves they have at Arsenal would show on his asset sheet, if they were still in CL then they would sustain themselves using that money he will not invest extra revenue to get that back into the CL at this time. The article also felt that if costs overran on the stadium he'd use Arsenal's revenue to plug gaps or something to that effect.

They seem to have capped their transfer budget this season at £50M; now this may be fair enough given what they have spent in the last few windows (luckily mostly on dross) but the situation they find themselves in is of their own making through just letting wenger deal with football side of things and just happily only spending to ensure top 4 rather than spending to actually challenge for the top. From a business perspective the stadium is win-win: if Arsenal fans boycott because they see the mismanagement, they will always have tourists and day-trippers to fill in the stands. You could easily see our stadium have the same win-win scenario for ENIC given our recent displays on the pitch (though Tottenham is not as accessible as N5/N7 in terms of transport so perhaps less).

Later today, i'll see if i can find the article.
 
There was an article i read whereby Kroenke is building a large new NFL stadium for his Rams team in the States and his business model for Arsenal would have been that he doesn't invest any more than they would generate from CL so he can concentrate his finances on the Rams stadium rebuild. It was said that when he increased his ownership share of Arsenal he could use it as an asset with the banks for taking out his loans or something to that effect. Basically, the cash reserves they have at Arsenal would show on his asset sheet, if they were still in CL then they would sustain themselves using that money he will not invest extra revenue to get that back into the CL at this time. The article also felt that if costs overran on the stadium he'd use Arsenal's revenue to plug gaps or something to that effect.

They seem to have capped their transfer budget this season at £50M; now this may be fair enough given what they have spent in the last few windows (luckily mostly on dross) but the situation they find themselves in is of their own making through just letting wenger deal with football side of things and just happily only spending to ensure top 4 rather than spending to actually challenge for the top. From a business perspective the stadium is win-win: if Arsenal fans boycott because they see the mismanagement, they will always have tourists and day-trippers to fill in the stands. You could easily see our stadium have the same win-win scenario for ENIC given our recent displays on the pitch (though Tottenham is not as accessible as N5/N7 in terms of transport so perhaps less).

Later today, i'll see if i can find the article.

Sorry, I am a bit lost. Are you criticizing Kroenke because he isn’t ploughing more of his own money into the club he owns?

It is entirely feasible that Kroenke is using the asset value of his share in Arsenal to help secure personal finance for other projects. However that wouldn’t stop Arsenal from signing players. For example when Arsenal paid £60 million for Aubamayang their cash position may reduce but the club will show the player as an asset at that same value thus not really affecting the value of the overall asset owned by Kroenke.

I'm also not sure where your facts come from about Kroenke refusing to push the boat out at Arsenal....

This from an article reviewing Arsenal's finances....

Q are Arsenal's finances in good health?

A: Arsenal's spending had already begun to exceed their means. Even before missing out on Champions League football for 2017-18, Arsenal's cash balances, after some years of substantial growth, were shrinking significantly.

The £46.3m cash deficit of 2017-18 is not something a self-sustaining club like Arsenal can afford for many years in a row. Yet the improved transfer activity of the past couple of windows and the new wage commitments both suggest a decision has been taken to push the available resources hard.

In the early part of 2017-18, sales of development properties raised £14.5m. Had they not, then the £19.7m net operating cash inflow of the first six months of the year would have been commensurately lower. There is still a stock of £8.1m worth of property on the books and if similar margins can be realised from that, then there could be upwards of £35m more to come in property sales.

But that would still not cover the absence of even one season's Champions League football.

Q. Can the club afford to miss out on the Champions League again?

A: Arsenal's estimated turnover dipped by a little less than £20m ($25.5m) to about £400m in 2017-18. Yet costs rose, cutting the £52.0m profit of 2016-17 in half to around £25m. The cash inflow will have added an estimated £10m to the overall balance.

Assuming revenues stay flat in the current season, the rising wage costs will likely wipe those profits out altogether, with additional spending on transfers, debt interest and repayments, tax and infrastructure shrinking the cash balance by a further £30m or £40m .

A figure at the upper end of that scale would eat up more than 25 percent of all the cash Arsenal have. And if that eight-figure gamble does not pay off this year with a return to the Champions League, there could be trouble ahead.

Q. What happens next?

A: Champions League riches would lead to Arsenal being self-funding again, without having to dip in to the cash reserves. But if they do not return to the competition this year, the club will recalibrate their sights.

It could mean an extended period of financial frugality, while others in England who are unconstrained by the limits of a self-sustaining model, such as Everton -- whom this week Usmanov ironically declared himself open to investing in -- Wolves or Leicester, perhaps, burst past them.
 
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I think we would have had the pen anyway - without VAR. And I agree with Poch re. it. Yes bring in more tech, but some of it needs finessing, and some games are going to be stop start affairs.

Oliver would have had to overrule the linesman's flag, which wouldn't have happened IMO.
 
I indeed was around for the 90s @parklane1 and followed Spurs during half of the 80s.
I remember how mediocre we often were and remember us nearly going out of business.
As a club we have indeed pulled our socks up, and i am grateful for ENIC and Levyt for that.

But we are at a crunch point whereby it remains to be seen whether we are going to be a good business model for ENIC and their investments over the years or a club that can actually consistently WIN honours because we are a good business.
Look how things are down the road, whereby they are a great business but their owner is not much interested in Arsenal succeeding other than in getting top 4. We could easily go the same way.
As i say, i give ENIC a lot of credit but until we start attempting to challenge for the top honours, the jury for me is still out.

Only a churl would try and deny that ENIC have got us to a better place than we were in during the 90s and the earlier years of their tenure, but for me the question about the true value of the ENIC legacy won't be answered until after they've taken their £2bn (or whatever the number turns out to be) and walked away.
 
To stop play

The ref blew up and he flagged

Watch it again as there’s is a delay

There often is. I've seen countless times where linesmen wait for the referee before making a decision, but the delay notwithstanding, he clearly indicated offside. The fact it looked like the ref had just blown for a penalty probably made his mind up for him.
 
I was at the game and behind the lino
He didn’t flag for offside
He flagged once the ref had blown up

the TV didn’t show it very well

Yeah from my seat behind the goal in Club Wembley it looked to me as though the linesman's flag did not go up until the keeper cleaned out Kane. We were all fuming that he had raised his flag so late.

Isn't that how things are supposed to work with VAR? At least it did in the world cup, I don't know if the implementation is the same in the PL :
Pierluigi Collina, the chairman of Fifa’s referees committee...said assistant referees had been advised to keep their flag down for tight offside calls and to leave it to VAR to decide.
If you see some assistant referee not raising the flag, it’s not because he’s making mistakes,” Collina said. “It’s because he’s respected the instruction to keep the flag down. They were told to keep the flag down when there is a tight offside incident and there could be a very promising attack or a goal-scoring opportunity because, if the assistant referee raises the flag, then everything is finished.”
 
Isn't that how things are supposed to work with VAR? At least it did in the world cup, I don't know if the implementation is the same in the PL :
Pierluigi Collina, the chairman of Fifa’s referees committee...said assistant referees had been advised to keep their flag down for tight offside calls and to leave it to VAR to decide.
If you see some assistant referee not raising the flag, it’s not because he’s making mistakes,” Collina said. “It’s because he’s respected the instruction to keep the flag down. They were told to keep the flag down when there is a tight offside incident and there could be a very promising attack or a goal-scoring opportunity because, if the assistant referee raises the flag, then everything is finished.”
That’s how it worked in the World Cup
It hasn’t been confirmed in this cup
The lino lets play go
Then after the foul and ref blows, he raised his flag to signal a stop in play
Then the ref consular VAR
 
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