Finney Is Back
Luka Modric
Thank GHod for Pochettino eh? Imagine where we’d be now without his extra what?.. £400m? from CL competition and the additional commercial revenue it resulted in.
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Daniel Levy - Chairman
- Thread starter Howard Webb
- Start date
SpurMeUp
Jimmy Cantrell
What he did is a little underappreciated. I for one wish we still had him. That's not to say he didn't have his weaknesses. Tbh I'm not even sure I want Mourinho sacked. If you believe a Manager to be talented, then you have to give them time to work. The problem with Mourinho is his predisposition to protect. Is it an age thing? Or a default thing? Certain games when we could have kicked on, he hides. When we hit the top of the league, we hid. We stopped developing. We stopped pushing forward as a side. That I find hard to accommodate. Its almost like he is falling back on his philosophy for being defensive first. When a younger Mourinho might have been more gallent?
I don't understand why people get hung up on what Levy said regarding transfers - what was he meant to do, tell the world we were going to be strapped for cash the following 5 years or so? That would have instantly put us on the back foot in any negotiation from that point onward and had our best players knocking on his door asking to get out of dodge...I suppose it was too much to expect people to use a bit of common sense.
Nice analogy and pretty accurate too.
Finney Is Back
Luka Modric
I think the answer is actually a lot more simple.... the stadium went WAY over budget.
I don't ever recall seeing a budget for the stadium.
Wouldnt be the first build to over run on costs though and as i said previously you do not have the faintest idea about the particulars of the who what where and whys and should be smart enough to know you cannot draw any conclusions on something you are so in the dark on.
Makes me laugh when football supporters think they can critique a construction project like they do the managers team selections or other aspects of the football side of things.
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Finney Is Back
Luka Modric
How can you deduce anything else?.... Unless you think the aim was to go into the stadium with £1 billion of debt against £300m of turnover?
You don't deduce anything because it's something that you don't have the first clue on - you're a smart chap you should know when a subject is beyond your knowledge
glorygloryeze
Ian Walker
Well, this could be, erm, interesting if true....
Anyone able to verify?
Anyone able to verify?
Rumoured to be an NFL training complex in the local press, i read on another board a couple of weeks back.
Don't know why that story requires an ENICOUT hashtag
Finney Is Back
Luka Modric
Ok so 4 years straight of unbudgeted CL qualifications, including a run to the final. And only and £30m net spend in total in those 10 transfer windows and yet still arriving in that stadium having £650m of debt and you don’t think we went way over budget?
I don't know what the budget was, i don't know what the final costs were so no, i dont think anything about it.
What i do know is that the only other club that built a stadium in recent history had 10 years of a net spend of 0 around the time of their build, all things considered we appear to have managed to avoid doing so for a similar length of time.
Finney Is Back
Luka Modric
I’m not sure that’s true.... Enfield council were offering a 25 year lease for that land (to be retained as recreational use)... I know that as I was part of an interested party for that land and did a reasonable amount of initial work but couldn't end up making the sums work to make the risk/reward worthwhile.
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Finney Is Back
Luka Modric
The usual modus operandi for making money out of golf courses is to charge £150 a lorry to dump hardcore and use that to remodel the course. However I think this clause stops that from being viable....
- for bids involving any landscaping within the park, bidders must clearly show that their business plan is not based on soil importation
MKSpur
Christian Ziege
Well it’s one of two things, based on what he said.
1 - he didn’t intend to impact the transfer budget but was forced to once the stadium build went way over the intial budget.
2 - he lied and prioritised a new stadium over the playing staff.
either way, there was even more unexpected revenue during the period that was also not used for transfers. I know ‘all projects over run’ but that doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be some form of scrutiny on the either the decision to sacrifice the squad to complete it or the amount of overrun there actually was. Whatever the original budget was, the CL money definitely funded it and depending on your persuasion our transfer budget was intentionally or unintentionally used too.
It’s of course sexy that a global pandemic impacts us more than any other club and that the huge sacrifices made to create potentially the largest matchday revenue stream, the largest non matchday revenue stream and maybe even a unique additional one with an NFL tie in, plus the associated naming rights demonstrating this income would have attracted have all been lost for 2 seasons.
ricky2tricky4city
Tom Huddlestone
If you know very little about business/corporate/infrastructure finance it's impossible to draw conclusions. Mainly because you can't honestly say you can view the debate from all sides. And from the fan side all you draw is emotional conclusions.
I think scrutiny is fair but what I'm seeing from Finney goes beyond that, he's apportioning blame and talking as though it's fact when it's nothing more than guess work. I don't think it's coincidence that he also has a dim view of Levy in general.
Interesting you bring up the pandemic, imagine if that hit during the build and we'd spent any cash reserves on squad upgrades - obviously an extreme example but I'd imagine there are a multitude of reasons why it's important to run a tight ship until a time the final costs for a build are known. It's comparable behaviour with the only other club to have built a stadium anywhere close to the same level (ours being much more bespoke and leading edge in fact) so that's something we can point to as a precedent and measure ourselves against.
SpurMeUp
Jimmy Cantrell
The stadium puts us in a strong position still. Lenders will be making allowances and we got more cheap money from the government. Naturally levy is counting the 4-5m we’d have made each home game and is crying into his balance sheet. Mourinho was probably promised some of this money to spend. But we’ve got to where we are - new stadium and regular European football - without spending silly oil money. Few seem to remember how exciting it was to get Europa league and how far we have come. And we are in a far better position than we were, with a platform to make the next step back up to CL regular and vie for trophies.
Sitting on my porcelain throne using glory-glory.co.uk mobile app
Sitting on my porcelain throne using glory-glory.co.uk mobile app
Finney Is Back
Luka Modric
I don’t have a ‘dim’ view of Levy. I think he is an ‘OK’ chairman. He does what he thinks is best for this club. Gets some things right and some things wrong. I would absolutely like him to put somebody in place between him and the manager as I think his decisions on first team matters are often poor, but think the club is at least in safe hands under his stewardship (which is a bold thing to say in some ways with us carrying by far the biggest debt in British football probably the biggest ever?)
I have simply drawn a logical conclusion that the stadium went a long way over budget for the reasons that MKSpur outlined above. I think Levy is a clever man (he must be to have a 1st glass degree from Cambridge) so his plan would never have been to arrive in that stadium £1billion in debt with £300m of revenue (as the case would’ve been without Poch’s 4 CL qualifications).
I must confess that I hadn’t considered MKs other option that he just chose to make the stadium better than planned by instead spending the transfer budget on the stadium. I hope that didn’t happen as that would probably have stopped us winning some titles for the sake of bells and whistles.
Of course we’ll never know exactly how much over budget we went on the stadium as Levy was very careful (and clever) to never put a number into the public domain.
I still think the stadium will be a huge asset for us for a long while, irrespective of the overspend and am very grateful to Levy for committing to it and driving it through. I just think that a few less bells and whistles with (some) of the significant money earned by Poch and the team reinvested back into the team would’ve achieved the right balance.
The CEO of a company should never get a free pass if a capital project costs a lot more than anticipated. ‘Well they always do’ is not a sensible response to this happening. For example I believe that Arsenal’s Emirates stadium was completed on time (and I think also on budget).
As things stand the club has a very large debt that we will need to reduce. I actually do trust Levy to reduce that debt (it will make his and Lewis’ stake in the club worth more so I’m sure club funds will be found to pay this off). I just hope that the right balance is found between investment in the team and paying off the capital. As Levy is a clever man I hope he has also learned that no matter how good your manager (and we clearly had a diamond) virtually zero net investment into the playing squad will see you go backwards. I also hope that next time (assuming there is one) we have a manager that has got us to the cusp of challenging for one of the really big trophies that manager is backed in terms of doing all that can be done to bring in his number 1 targets so we’ve done everything possible to do what football clubs should be aiming to do.... and that is win trophies, not grow balance sheets.
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Diamond Lights
Didier Zokora
Daniel Levy is a fantastic businessman and should stick to business. He should have no say whatsoever with regards to the footballing aspect on the pitch (see Gareth Bale 2020 transfer for example - a Levy signing, not a Jose one).
A few thoughts:
1) He would have sacked any manager by now, the only thing holding him back is he knows the slating will be entirely on him for not backing Poch and bringing in Jose despite the warnings
2) He needs to hire a DoF asap
3) heard this on a podcast, but speaks volumes that Paul Mitchell left Spurs with no job to go directly to, rather than stay at Tottenham under Levy. Quite telling that.
A few thoughts:
1) He would have sacked any manager by now, the only thing holding him back is he knows the slating will be entirely on him for not backing Poch and bringing in Jose despite the warnings
2) He needs to hire a DoF asap
3) heard this on a podcast, but speaks volumes that Paul Mitchell left Spurs with no job to go directly to, rather than stay at Tottenham under Levy. Quite telling that.
MKSpur
Christian Ziege
Re number 1 - It is out of character for Levy to throw 200k a week at a player purely on reputation. I wonder if he has an affliction where it doesn’t actually matter what he buys, as long as is it is lower than the list price. The sort of logic where he’s ‘saved’ 400k a week and got one over on Madrid, rather than spending 200k a week on a bit part player? Don’t get me wrong I was excited by the signing and saw it as low risk overall, but when you look at our transfers most of the successes have come at the lower end of our investment. It’s for this reason I honestly believe the Sanchez deal must have some secret structure to it and the Sissoko deal was driven by a friendly payment arrangement with Saudi Sportswashing Machine. It is a really dangerous situation if he did force Bale upon Mourinho though. I know Redknapp said he offered him Suarez and Redknapp mistakenly thought he was too similar to VdV so I’d like to think Mourinho was involved.
It all leads to number 2 though, we need to ensure we have a better approach to transfers, we seem to have lost our way in an area that was giving us a competitive advantage.
I do like the fact Levy is not an attention seeker and constantly airing our dirty laundry to the press but I really hope one day l, perhaps after he has left that he writes a book, just to see what conflicts he had with managers, the transfer negotiations that went well and any he ferrets and how responsible he really has been for the transfer personnel decisions.