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Our impossible position

Millsy_Yiddo said:
I absolutely 100% knew this would happen this year. It happens every year on the back of success. I posted a while back a thread called the power of expectation or something like that.

Over achieving is almost the very worst thing a manager can do in the current day and age. In the modern 24 hour a day super sports headline for every little thing sky world once you have over achieved, you become that level. Therefore once you drop the slightest below that level they cut you down, because its all about sensation and news now. Unfortunately the fans have been fed all this brick for so long that greater and greater percentages are starting to believe it. So once you over achieve, you are held at a level which if you drop below gets you in trouble.

The facts are, last year we finished 3rd in the league, with a very young team. On this very forum at the start of this season 90% on here thought we would have finished 5-6th maybe challenged for 4th. So finishing 3rd and challenging for the title until the last few games was an amazing over achievement for a team so young.

Now, at the end of last season, 90% of people on here when asked said, it's very unlikely that we'll repeat that. Chelsea, City etc will be back, Liverpool will be stronger.

So now, Chelsea and City are back. Liverpool are stronger. We are sitting on a similar points total to last season at this point having not really got into our stride.

Yet, a growing proportion of the fan base are unhappy. All of a sudden, Poch hasn't spent his money well, the players aren't buying into his methods anymore, moving Eric Dier out of midfield has upset the more sensitive members of the fudging team. Why is all this being said? Because the media constantly feed this hogwash into people and eventually it starts to catch on.

I'd ask everyone on this forum to sit down and think about what their expectations were for this season and ask them selves, are we really that far away from where you thought we would be? And if we are, why is that? If we are not, why the need for the crisis talks?
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Top post mate.

Disappointment in the CL, but we're 4 points off 4th and 7 points off 1st having missed our most important attacking player and best central defender for a large portion of the season so far.
 
johnola said:
Let not forget Chelsea, Liverpool , city and united all dropped out of the cl at the group stage in recent years.

Leicester showing everyone the way, which is give it 100% and don't seek out hard lessons you don't need to learn.
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Leicester are also showing the way by having a significantly easier group than us and by being 14th in the league.

tw12yid said:
Money is one thing but when our squad IMO has been weakened by transfers then I can't completely accept the point. Chadli and Townsend are two players which offered us chances created and goals. Compared to them, although he has improved, we have the liability of Llamela. Never sure if he's about to do something brilliant or petulant and get sent off. Then we have £30m sissoko. Why oh why!!!
After two full seasons we are now seeing pochetinos squad. I think in the attacking 1/3rd it looks worse now than it has done.
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Lamela has 0 red cards for us and 0 red cards for Roma. The worry is yours mate, don't blame Lamela for it.
Townsend was a huge liability and is struggling to prove himself good enough for a team hoping to be mid-table and failing at it.
Chadli was excellent at some things, distinctly average at others and inferior to all of Alli, Eriksen, Lamela and Son quite comfortably.

Sissoko... has been disappointing even by a low standard.

What was our attacking third that impressed you so much the season before Pochettino took over?

Modric THFC said:
I sourced the figures above in a post. They're from Sporting intelligence and they match up with whats on Swiss Ramble and published reported on the official Spurs website.

Monaco might have one or two on a high wage but they had a complete clear out at the club after the Russian owner was handed the biggest divorce settlement in history (£2.7 billion!). They changed their entire setup and invested in younger players on smaller wages.

Anyway my point was that wages aren't the be all and end all. A comparison with Monaco and Leverkusen's wages were supposed to show this.
I mean you can pay Sissoko 95k a week and not even include him in the squad.
United can have a huge wage bill and outside the top 4 season after season.
The same Chelsea players that were bricke last season and earlier in this one are getting paid the same as the ones top of the league now.

Its down to the best use of what you have and targeting the right players. We go out every year and buy back up and wonder why our squad doesnt improve

We have Lloris, Walker, Vertonghen, Rose, Dembele, Eriksen, Lamela and Kane. All 8 first choice. All 8 predate Poch.

We go out every season and take punts on players and hope Poch can do the best with it.
Some of them work out like Dier and Alli. Some are a mess like Fazio, Yedlin, Sissoko, N'Jie, Stambouli.

Under Poch only Alderweireld was bought with the intention of sticking him straight into the first team.

You can see why Paul Mitchell left. I must have been incredibly frustrating working under a budget. Only for the head coach to decide he wants Moussa Sissoko for 30m and another £25m in wages over the next 5 years.
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It's not the end all be all. But there's a clear correlation between wages and results. And this is one of those instances where correlation does seem to imply causation very strongly. That correlation isn't strong enough that it always predicts results over a 6 game CL group. But over several seasons of PL football it's a significant hurdle to overcome for a club in our position.
 
ricky2tricky4city said:
Ah @DubaiSpur you really are the best. On Saturday evening you split yourself open and let it all spill out. Bang on about this, bang on about that.....a wounded soldier. The next day, you're reflective and back to your best. You do write some wonderful stuff. (something in SN&V the other day was epic). Thought provoking. Heartfelt.

My connection with Tottenham is similar to yours, i love what we represent, i love our tradition and i love the way we try to do things the right way.

The way we are trying to bridge the gap, the way we are trying to push things forward, the plans we have are encased in those qualities. It is business as well, of course it is, we are talking a big project and big numbers. But it is the entrance to another 100 years of THFC.

Thats why i'm happy that Levy is on board and Poch as well. Levy hopes Poch is our Wenger and when it comes to business and delivering then Levy is the man to have in your corner.(i know he's kicked your cat at some point:))

Im fully bought in. So much so that i cut them some slack, dont sweat the small stuff, knowing that the bigger picture is all they care about, achieving objectives and pushing things forward. None of those objectives are trophies, star signings, or high wages. And d'you know what that's sad, it severely detracts from what week to week football is about, the guts and the glory. That is stolen from me at the moment because i have signed up to the bigger picture (although its not like we're sh1t;)).

To bookend this with another war analogy......it's like i'm in the helicopter and some of you guys are down there in the trenches, gaining 100yds one week, losing 50yds the next, taking flak, suffering shellshock, trying to make sense of it. Hop in the helicopter and so much of the daily battle falls away, there is a bigger picture....look to the horizon, we dont have to do much more than we're doing now (and we're doing very well considering), it could drag on for 5 years or more BUT as i said before this is the next 100 years of Tottenham Hotspur we are talking about.

My only fear is, that if, no WHEN we get there it better be f*cking worth it.
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Well, the end goal of any sporting project is to win trophies, to my mind. Not to be wildly financially successful all the time, but to win trophies for its fans and establish a community in its locality that binds all locals together in the spirit of a common enterprise. Those two objectives are what distinguish football as a sport from being just another business industry.The latter is something that modern football is ceaselessly stripping away with its determined corporate desire to turn supporters into powerless, mute customers that can be switched around at will, and I've launched my own online tirades against that on the NDP thread ;) - however, that isn't something that is specific to us as a club, it's a football-wide phenomenon especially concentrated in the UK, so Levy and Poch stand fully exempt from any individual blame on that score.

The former, however, is what irks me here. Not so much because I expect us to only concentrate on trophies while letting the shovels stay in the ground and the club shrink compared to its industry competitors, but because I expect at least *some* consideration to be given to the endeavour, especially given our history and our shining ideals - and that's just not happening at the moment when it comes to any competitions outside the league. I guess, to take your military analogy further (to truly ridiculous levels :p ), the end goal of any offensive is to debilitate the enemy's will to fight and his ability to hinder your objectives - sure, the squaddies in the trenches are the ones more furiously sweating every yard of ground gained or lost and every small position secured or abandoned, but ultimately, both the squaddies and the Army Air Corps people in the helicopters have those common objectives in mind.

And both the squaddies and the Recce chaps in the helos should be sweating it out when they see that, although the grand plan of the offensive is being achieved, a lot of potentially easy efforts to both make the lives of those grunts easier and advance the overall plan at the same time are being ignored in pursuit of the broad sweep of the grander plan. It shouldn't be that hard for us as a club to at least give one or two trophies a good go over the course of a season, and winning one would advance the club significantly in multiple ways - it would instill a winning mentality in the squad, it would help us reinforce the dignified, paternal admonishments to the flow of the game that are displayed on the hoardings around the stadium, it would increase our profile as a club and it would give the fans something to cheer about and build more enduring nostalgic bonds to the club over. And yet, we aren't really trying. It's like when the squaddies spot an enemy position that's raining fire down on them, but from where the enemy's planning to make an unopposed, leisurely retreat - taking them out would hinder the enemy, sap their fighting potential, advance the overall plan *and* relieve the grunts in the trenches, but it isn't being done.

Even the calm, serene chap in the helo might get annoyed at that sometimes. Especially when his helo takes fire from the same position. :p On the whole, the grand plan is one that we're all subscribed to, for better or worse. I just wish it didn't ignore so many possibilities for mutual happiness and success along the way, that's all. Especially given our history and our ideals - the ideals we all fell in love with, one way or another, when we signed up for this particular army in white. :)
 
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Bullet said:
Wow, look at those wages.
If we spent say £900m on wages in 9 years and City spent say £1.8bn on wages in 9 years... you can forget transfer fees.
Who cares if a player was £15m or £25m when you look at the sheer scale of the wages over 9 years
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Indeed... over the past decade, Spurs are the only club amongst the "big 6" who haven't broken the £billion barrier on wages!!

Total wage bills for the 9 seasons between 2007 and 2015

Chelsea = £1.534 billion
ManU = £1.382 billion
ManC = £1.314 billion
Arsenal = £1.186 billion
Liverpool = £1.079 billion
Tottenham = £702 million

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Bedfordspurs said:
The problem is rarely the transfer fee, its the wages - we pay high transfer fees and they get written off periodically to suit our finances (you can't do that with wages as its a regular expenditure you can't capitalise)

For example is rumoured to be on anywhere between £100k and £150k a week!!! He is a very good player but hasn't won anything of note and would be on more than anyone in our whole squad!!!!!

Our wage bill is over a £1m a week less than Arsenal for example

We dont have the income to pay those wages on a fixed contract without greater revenue and that won't happen until the new stadium
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The new stadium should get us in the top 3 for match day income...

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Although, Levy still needs to secure some huge sponsorship deals just to get us into the top 5 for total revenue...

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And fingers crossed that Pochettino can get us a bigger slice of the €uropean prize money...

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elltrev said:
Always funny and interesting to see how quickly the mood can change. As many people were saying at the time of our poor form, think our problem was just key injuries and an ensuing lack of confidence.

How quickly and significantly things have turned.
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Think that's gonna be the nature of this season.......ebbs and flows for all the top six.
 
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