ENIC

[Muttley]

Agreed. I think the succession planning would have happened if we trusted Poch, because he seemed to have a really great eye for when a given player had peaked, and when the right time to move them on would be. In his ideal world, we probably move out a couple of these players each season, sign replacements that would have started from a higher level than the ones we signed at the start of his reign, and importantly welcomed them into a squad where the culture and style was well established.

As it was, we tried to keep that squad together as long as we could, right the way through Jose arguing he could get a tune out of them that Poch couldn’t (likely from the club / Levy being scarred from being forced to lose Modric, Bale, Carrick, Berbatov). The idea being that we had a great squad, and just needed to keep them for a change. Of course it wasn’t just the quality of the players, it was a culture and a system that meant that levelled up. And when it came time to replace them all, major surgery was required, inevitably we didn’t spend on top class proven replacements and so we began a cycle again, only this time having destroyed the culture that made us what we were.

I always use the 2017 summer and 2018 Jan windows as what typified Spurs at that time.

We sold Walker, Wimmer, Bentaleb, Njie, Fazio, Jansen - one Spurs legend (for me) and a kid in Bentaleb who had talent but seemed to have attitude issues. I couldn't blame Poch for moving him on. The other 4 players moving on were for the reason we recruited badly in the first place. However we gained something like £80-100m in recouped money.

We bought Sanchez, Moura, Aurier, Llorente, Foyth, Gazzaniga for slightly more than we recouped. It was just shocking recruitment. Our scouts thought Sanchez was going to be a high end centre half to replace Toby or Jan eventually. In Aurier and Moura we went into the £25m for a 25 year old model. When is that ever going to work? Moura's career stats at Spurs were incredibly poor. We should have consolidated down to Trips and KWP, but then had to watch the hapless Aurier for many seasons. We bought average and we got average results.

So we ultimately sold 6 and bought 6. We should have sold 6 and bought 2 elite signings with academy promotion. That is how you improve.

We went from 86 league points to 77 and then down to 71 and then again down to 59. A 27 point decline in the league in 3 seasons. Absolutely shocking football operations management from the club.