The Overlap - some interesting comments from Ange

[Eriktheviking]

A

Could I suggest it was more spoke than bid.... shades of Rivaldo, I suspect.

But hey, let's delude ourselves we have a top 5 squad!

Ange never said bid, he said they discussed.

 

[parklane1]

I get pretty much all of the critique of the higher ups, but our transfer policy comes down to - can we afford it? Can we afford paying larger wages? Can we afford paying more money for players? Levy was big on staying within FFP, but no one seems to care about that anyway, and there doesn't seem to be any repercussions for those that don't - yet, from a legal perspective, we were doing the right thing. Sure, in theory we could've given as much of a fudge about FFP as Chelski and City, but without mega rich owners wanting to spend, how are we going to just blast money at five senior players over a summer?

I want us to just throw money at anyone and everyone that moves as much as the next guy, but are we really in a financial position to do so with having to pay the debt on the stadium and so on? It seems like such a footnote whenever this is discussed, "they should spend more, the cowards! well, ok, so the downpayment on the stadium cost a bit, yet still!" - kind of like squad of 10 fit players should perform as well as a squad of 22 fit players.

I don't know. Playing a bit of devil's advocate here. A lot of our higher ups clearly don't have a clue about football, and the higher ups in the club (and the club as whole, maybe) probably do have a culture of being self-defeating cowards (ironically), but how much leeway have we really had when it's come to our finances? We are in reality nowhere near any of the big teams, probably due to lack of domestic and international success over years and years (as well as the stadium).

I'm rambling and quite possibly wrong - but it just sounds a bit simplified to say, "if they had just spent more, they would win more". I would've spent more too, if I had more money, but alas.

To much sense in that for some.

 

[parj]

Is this even close to news? We do spend on fees but not wages. And we take forever doing transfers. Any manager coming in that doesn't know that should really get a better agent.

 

[DubaiSpur]

Is this even close to news? We do spend on fees but not wages. And we take forever doing transfers. Any manager coming in that doesn't know that should really get a better agent.

It's not really news, but it is the first open admission of this.

Up until this year we've had allusions and insinuations from the likes of Danny Rose ('buying players I need to Google'), Poch ('building a mansion and filling it with IKEA furniture') and Conte ('20 years the owners here and they win nothing, why?').

As far as I can recall, Ange is the first one to come out and bluntly say that he wanted players the club were way too tight-fisted to pay for, and thus he got cheap teenagers instead. He even named them - Guehi, Semenyo, Neto, etc. And linked it directly to why we don't operate like a big club.

It's a level of detail we haven't gotten before, and that's what makes it interesting.

To be fair, the club admitted it too - Venkatesham's January statement about boosting spending on wages was as much as anything else, an admission of how utterly short-sighted the Levy/Lewis policy was. But whether that was deceptive window dressing or a genuine commitment to change, we don't know yet.

 

[kb 1984]

You know how to scroll yeah?

Nope

 

[DubaiSpur]

I don't know. Playing a bit of devil's advocate here. A lot of our higher ups clearly don't have a clue about football, and the higher ups in the club (and the club as whole, maybe) probably do have a culture of being self-defeating cowards (ironically), but how much leeway have we really had when it's come to our finances? We are in reality nowhere near any of the big teams, probably due to lack of domestic and international success over years and years (as well as the stadium).

I'm rambling and quite possibly wrong - but it just sounds a bit simplified to say, "if they had just spent more, they would win more". I would've spent more too, if I had more money, but alas.

Honestly lots of food for thought here. There's two things that I would argue with, though.

The first is that our transfer spending under ENIC has followed a rough trajectory as follows -

1) 2001-2009 - high net spend, low wages, focused on acquiring young talent.

2) 2010-2019 - low net spend, low wages - the austerity years where the priority was the stadium build - coincided with our best ever Premier League side being left to wither and die without support.

3) 2019-present - high net spend, low wages, focused on a mix of young talent and mid-career players willing to accept low wages.

The stadium came with a promise that it would change the way the club operates - it never really did. The club operates now much as it did in the 2000s, except the absolute scale of fees is bigger because the market has changed. This applies to everyone, not just us.

But in terms of wages to revenue, we are by far the lowest in the league, at 42%. And this means we are always immediately out of the conversation when it comes to the best players, because no one worth their salt comes to Spurs for relatively paltry wages.

The Levy gamble post-stadium was that sprinkling a few experienced pros willing to come here on cheap wages amidst our usual spending on young players, would be enough to drive us over the top. It didn't.

And the question now is - what if we operated differently? What if, instead of a high net spend but a very low wage bill, we did the opposite? Paid market rates for the best players, when we needed them, instead of spaffing the same money on 4-5 mediocre deadweights who come cheap, wage-wise?

Ange used the example of Declan Rice - Arsenal needed him, spent 100m, got him. Spurs spent a lot of money in that same window, but on a bunch of far lesser players who didn't provide anywhere near as much value.

That's where things needed changing. And it didn't even need that much more investment, just moving away from the model of keeping wages abysmally low no matter the cost.

Now of course it's too late - the dross we've bought since 2019 has meant that a full rebuild is needed, and that will be supremely costly both fee wise and wage wise. But it didn't need to be this way.

 

[Bullet]

I presume the thinking from Levy was: What if the player becomes an absolute idiot and hardly plays, but we are paying him a fortune and he just sits there smirking for 2 or 3 years e.g. Alexis Sanchez at the Gooners, Aubameyang, Adebayor, Bogarde at Cheatski, Ndombele at Spurs etc.

Better not to attract mercenaries. Better to pay a lower wage BUT have large bonuses to take a player up to really good money IF they play a lot and the team does well. E.g. Kane and Son.

Not saying that is right, just saying that is a reasonable approach and perhaps that was Levy's thinking.

NOTE I agree there is scope to increase wages and VV agrees too, but we do need to avoid wage vampires.

We can pay higher wages than many clubs abroad can. But not all of course.

Clearly for top talents that are wanted by """THE BIG FIVE""" and ourselves, then wages are a key factor (as well as us about to be relegated).

 

[parj]

I presume the thinking from Levy was: What if the player becomes an absolute idiot and hardly plays, but we are paying him a fortune and he just sits there smirking for 2 or 3 years e.g. Alexis Sanchez at the Gooners, Aubameyang, Adebayor, Bogarde at Cheatski, Ndombele at Spurs etc.

Better not to attract mercenaries. Better to pay a lower wage BUT have large bonuses to take a player up to really good money IF they play a lot and the team does well. E.g. Kane and Son.

Not saying that is right, just saying that is a reasonable approach and perhaps that was Levy's thinking.

NOTE I agree there is scope to increase wages and VV agrees too, but we do need to avoid wage vampires.

We can pay higher wages than many clubs abroad can. But not all of course.

Clearly for top talents that are wanted by """THE BIG FIVE""" and ourselves, then wages are a key factor (as well as us about to be relegated).

Wasn't it Jenas that said Tottenham were low basic salary payers but the bonuses made them compete with top clubs so you just had to back yourself and the team to get paid real money