Spurs Step In The Right Direction
Spurs Step In The Right Direction
Recently there has been news from Spain that Barcelona are awaiting a formal offer from Tottenham.
That deal is thought to be £25.87 million (€30m) with personal terms having already been agreed with the Spanish central midfielder. He will certainly have to improve his defensive displays if he joins us, they simply haven't been good enough during his loan spell at Everton.
Fulham have been relegated so yet again the story of Spurs interest in Ryan Sessegnon comes to the fore with the suggestion that the 18-year-old (19 on the 18th May) wants to stay in London and wants to join Spurs to work with Mauricio Pochettino.
That is the beauty of having a coach who will not only play youth but will coach them to improve, just as he does for every player. Not for Pochettino simply buying success, that isn't an option for everyone and hasn't been an option for us to date.
My question is why are all these other coaches not improving their teams by keeping players together, playing a set system, which you can change mid-game, and progress clubs each season?
The answer is that they are not good enough coaches, they are simply managers who can only progress through money.
The game needs more proper coaches in my view.
Daniel Levy set demanding standards, which is how you turn a club into winners, you don't accept second best. He searched and searched for a coach who could improve a team and didn't need to be bought a team.
Coaches came and went for that reason and as a coach I understood that and what he was looking for, something I totally agreed with. He found that man in Mauricio Pochettino.
What has happened now is that it has been such a success that instead of next season being our second in the UEFA Champions League, as was the plan, it is our fifth, the fourth on the trot and we are in the Champions League Final.
The income that has generated has allowed us to improve our wages structure on top of some of the best bonus payments in the league. This season we earn over £88 million (€101m) and we have guaranteed income next season from the competition. We earn something like £800,000 per game from the ground plus ticket sales.
These factors give us an even bigger transfer kitty than we have now and we do have one.
What Pochettino wants to do now is sit down with Daniel Levy and jointly decide the way forward. Daniel Levy has publicly said he wants to build Spurs to compete on a level playing field with Barcelona and Real Madrid, financially we are not there yet, there is still plenty of work to do off the field.
That has to be intertwined with investment into the team. We have the best training facilities and the best stadium, something a top clubs needs. Top players want the top facilities. Having provided that we need a top team and let's not get carried away by a Champions League Final, we are not good enough yet to compete for a Premier League title, one of our set objectives.
Injuries have contributed to the defeats we have had this season without a doubt, it has put pressure on other players and we been stretched. That is what makes our achievement of reaching the Champions League final so incredible.
Our transfer targets will have been identified already, indeed we will have been scouting them all season so we know who several of them are.
Their discussion is for the long term. The long term plan hasn't changed, but with improved financial resources ahead of time and evidence of what the new stadium can actually bring in, a new plan can be drawn up how to achieve the overall plan.
Money will have to be spent now and money will be spent. Part of the discussion will perhaps be that we can't be as tight with our money as we have been. Yes we will still need to be tough negotiators, but not to the extent that we price players out of a move or try to place too much in add-ons and not enough in the guaranteed element of the transfer fee.
If Gomes and Sessegnon are two of the players Pochettino wants and we are close to completing a deal for them then that is a step in the right direction.
COYS
Further Reading
Zaniolo watched again, Shashoua wins Spanish title
Fernando Llorente a Spurs Success
Zaniolo watched again, Shashoua wins Spanish title
Fernando Llorente a Spurs Success
1 comment
I was never convinced that simply going into the market to replace our existing players was a sound way forward. Buy them young; train them up; get them used to playing together season after season. This approach seems far more reliable, as well as reducing the risk of big-money buys considerably of course.
All the while the standard media cannot get past the idea that not to buy in the expensive players we can afford must, necessarily, be a bad move. Forget the season we've just completed in some of the hardest circumstances we've had to face in years; forget that we're going to play in Madrid in June. Even now they're all saying this happened in spite of our poor transfer work …