Still don’t let it deter you from the fact that we don’t act like the 8th richest club in the World. And it’s nothing to do with spending lots and lots as keeps on being the stick used to beat the ENIC detractors with. It would be a fine start if a levy wouldn’t penny pinch here and there whilst costing us on the pitch example 80 million man Grealish. Absolutely everything we needed but Levy’s pride messed that one up...footballing man, Spurs through and through my arse.
Yes we do. Rank Team Country Value in millions % change on year Debt as % of value Revenue ($M) 1 Real Madrid please log in to view this image Spain 4,239 4 1 896 2 Barcelona please log in to view this image Spain 4,021 -1 0 824 3 Manchester United please log in to view this image England 3,808 -8 19 795 4 Bayern Munich please log in to view this image Germany 3,024 -1 0 751 5 Manchester City please log in to view this image England 2,688 9 0 678 6 Chelsea please log in to view this image England 2,576 25 0 597 7 Arsenal please log in to view this image England 2,267 1 11 520 8 Liverpool please log in to view this image England 2,183 12 3 613 9 Tottenham Hotspur please log in to view this image England 1,624 31 37 511 10 Juventus please log in to view this image Italy 1,512 3 9 480 11 Paris Saint-Germain please log in to view this image France 1,092 12 0 646 12 Atlético Madrid please log in to view this image Spain 953 12 23 363 13 Borussia Dortmund please log in to view this image Germany 896 -1 0 379 14 Schalke 04 please log in to view this image Germany 683 -3 12 291 15 Internazionale please log in to view this image Italy 672 11 50 335 16 Roma please log in to view this image Italy 622 1 41 298 17 West Ham United please log in to view this image England 616 -18 10 236 18 Milan please log in to view this image Italy 583 -5 42 248 19 Everton please log in to view this image England 476 32 0 254 20 Newcastle United please log in to view this image England 381 - 0 240 Do you notice that 5 of the clubs above us are in the PL making us the 6th club AND YET we do better than that. The facts do not agree with you complaint Spurlock Picking out this or that player that we may or may not have got dependent on doubtful information or just plain bollocks is NOT an argument. That's why you always get people like me insisting that your argument is bullshit.
Is it Levy's fault we've bottled it in four of the five finals he's been Chairman though? If we'd have won four League Cups and a Champions League in 20 years many would consider that a great success for a club like us, especially when adding in a large number of top six finishes. The players and managers are the ones to blame on that front. If you're good enough to make a final you're good enough to win it. I'm 100% on board with slagging him off for the prices he charges Spurs fans but criticising him for lack of silverware is something I really don't understand. As for investment, I think he's shown this season that with all the infrastructure and resources in place, he can now spend the desired amounts. What he obviously needs to do is ensure this continues, we couldn't really spend £40m-£50m on multiple players roughly 4-5 years ago, the continued CL participation and strong league finishes plus the new stadium has now put us in a position to begin spending like a big team and I fully expect us to act like it. If in the next 2-3 transfer windows we go back to penny pinching and looking for more Nkoudou's rather than Lo Celso's, I'll be fully on board with any criticism about him on that front.
Manchester United have always backed their manager in the transfer market and given him the tools to win silverware, they make a lot of money and spend a lot of money. Spurs don`t.
We were cheated out of the CL final by a bent referee, which changed the entire game, I would hardly call that bottling it. We lost league cup finals on the lottery of penalties and also by a far better team, again hardly `bottling it`, maybe if Levy had given us a stronger squad we would have got over the line in one of those. You say `a club like us` that is the small time attitude that partly holds us back, we used to be one of the biggest clubs around and still have one of the largest fan bases. Time will tell whether Levy has any ambition to make us trophy winners or just a CL team.
Except for the times where they didn't, most obviously how they needed to rebuild eight years ago with Giggs and Scholes retiring, Vidic, Ferdinand and Evra getting on in years, and van Persie a constant injury risk - yet in some cases they haven't replaced those players even by now And they certainly haven't backed their managers: Moyes wasn't allowed to sign Baines and was treated like a fall guy from the outset, and Steptonho was publicly bemoaning his lack of support when he was there
No on-pitch legacy. A financial legacy for the club (for now - although it seems to be eroding by the season) .
So conceding a penalty in the first minute means we were right to play the following 89 like a bunch of Sunday League amateurs? Pochettino also decided to start not one but two unfit players in Winks and Kane. The players and manager bottled that final, even if the penalty was soft, show some bollocks and go at Pool, we were limp and got what we deserved. You're right, two of the three LC finals we faced better teams - Utd in 2009, Chelsea in 2015 with Blackburn in 2001 or 2002 being the other. However, as I said, if you're good enough to reach a final you're good enough to win it. Birmingham showed that when they faced "a better team" in Arsenal and Wigan showed it in the FA Cup Final against Man City. We didn't lose our finals because of Levy, we lost because we simply weren't good enough when it mattered and unfortunately that's been a recurring theme for the club for far too long. Depends how you define one of the biggest clubs around, we've generally been smaller than Utd, Liverpool and Arsenal (as much as that hurts to admit). On a par with Chelsea for the most part and bigger than City, yet those two have eclipsed us over the last decade or so thanks to their big spending owners. It's nothing to do with attitude holding us back, it's finances - which is exactly what Levy's been trying to increase by improving the infrastructure. The guy's a prick with regards to how he treats us fans but I do believe a lot of what he does is in the best interests of the club for the most part. I get frustrated like most with some of this footballing decisions but ultimately this football club has experienced huge growth under him and I hope that continues by reaching its final stage of now being a side that wins things on the regular.
The sad thing is that we actually showed that we prepared to play them: whenever Roberton or Alexander-Arnold got forward, we made sure that both the relevant fullback and Sissoko were doubling up on them - which was great preparation, unfortunately undermined by some Slovenian ****wit who thinks that ball-to-armpit is a deliberate handball
There is no possible way to increase the business value of a football club than to win trophies. To do that you have to have better players than your competitors which means creating more revenue to be able to buy them. Only two clubs have managed consistently to break into the Liverpool/Man U/Arsenal/Chelsea quartet since ENIC took over. Us and Man City. We did it very different ways and sometimes I think it would have been more fun to have done it the City way. But the City way wouldn't have worked without cheating.
Yes there is Hoffenheim were playing in Germany's amateur leagues back in 1992, which for the sake of context was the eighth tier, yet fast forwards to 2019-20 their value is almost incomprehensibly more than it was back then as the team has been established in the Bundesliga for over a decade in a new (well, new twelve years ago...) stadium and even has a Champions League campaign under their belt. And how many trophies did they win during this momentous rise? Two: the titles of the fifth tier in 2000 and fourth tier in 2001
I misworded my post slightly. What I meant to say was that there is no way of increasing the value of a football club without getting better on the field. Whether or not that wins trophies is not so much under the owners' control. As @Dier Hard pointed out, in a slightly different world we could have won 5 trophies. The argument that by buying different players we would have done better in the finals doesn't wash with me. If we had splashed out on £40m players instead of Nkoudou and Llorente for example we might well have improved the team theoretically, but we might have lost to Man City or Ajax in any case. Also if we had that sort of budget we probably wouldn't have bought Dier or Dele.
Technically we could have done better if we paid less on players than we did on Nkoudou and Janssen: Timo Werner and Ousmane Dembele both moved in the same window we signed Janssen and GKN, and they moved for less than we paid for Janssen combined That's been an issue with our squad signings for a long time, which goes back until at least the Redknapp era when we started making a concerted effort to have a deeper squad: with the obvious exceptions of Davies and Trippier (and, briefly, Wimmer) they never felt like players who could come in for a few games and do a job which is what a squad signing should be, they always felt like filler - yet if Dembele and Werner were signed at that time they'd not only have been capable of doing a job, but they'd have been pushing for regular football a couple of years later
Not sure where else to put this, but considering the transfer window has been to a refrain of "Levy never backed Poch like this" it's worth bringing this up In yesterday's Standard, Dan Kilpatrick offhandedly mentioned how Poch's approach to transfers was to set out his stall and say Player X was who was needed and that is who we should go all-out to sign - but if the club suggested Player Y as a potential transfer, be it because Player Y had become available or if Player X was a no-go for whatever reason, Poch would stick to his guns and say Player X was who we should go for In the article itself it Dan KP mentions Youri Tielemans and Marco Asensio as two players who became available and were offered to him, but in both cases Poch passed on them - in Tielemans' case it would have to be January 2019, as not only is that when Tielemans joined Leicester on loan but that's also when we were the club store started to sell effigies of Adrien Rabiot's mother due to the amount of time and energy being wasted with our attempts to sign him in that window that ended up coming to nothing With this in mind, the summer of 2018 suddenly becomes a very different conversation: Poch wanted Ndombele but we couldn't get him, as we expected to Alderweireld him out from under Lyon only to discover they'd triggered the option in his loan months earlier so they held all the cards, but with Ndombele off the table for a season that would mean we would have to look elsewhere - but we didn't. And it has to be said that (IIRC) before that summer Poch did say he wasn't interested in any Stambouli signings, clearly implying he wanted to build his next team at the earliest opportunity rather than build part of the team but other parts are made up of stopgaps like when Stambouli was signed to cover for Schneiderlin not joining us The thing is, Poch isn't actually wrong to say "This is the player I want, make sure you get them" because that's exactly what we did in the summer of 2019 with Ndombele, Lo Celso and Sessegnon just as we did in the summer of 2017 with Sanchez, Foyth and Gazzaniga - the problem is that his rejecting players offered to him during the previous twelve months, players such as Tielemans or some Aston Villa midfielder whose name escapes me now, meant that he was rebuilding one part of the team a year too late As a result, while he did do the rebuilding work that was needed for the 2018-19 season, albeit a year late, he was unable to do the rebuilding work needed for the 2019-20 season such as a RB, DM, and arguably a CB - and that's what ultimately did for him, as that extra year caught up with some players (most obviously Vertonghen) while the lack of a DM not only left our defence exposed while also making our bedding in Ndombele and Lo Celso more difficult as they are players you want when on the front foot yet we were too often on the back foot The real irony, though, is in some of those problem positions there potentially wasn't a problem: Trippier was dogshit for most of 2018-19 and Poch didn't rate Aurier, yet we had KWP available so he could (and should) have had his share of games to establish himself, not least because if he messed up he wouldn't be blaming teammates on the pitch for it like Trippier often did. And that's the issue with last season: as Poch was trying to bruteforce form into the team he stuck with the same core when there were other options, for example Winks isn't the No6 we've miscast him as for two years at this point yet Poch had been drip-feeding Skipp into the team since the previous season, and with Verts' decline there was a chance for Foyth to be Verts' long-term replacement which we signed him to be, and that's ultimately why the Colchester result hurt so much as that game saw KWP, Skipp, Tanganga and Parrott all start and, if that result went differently, that might have given Poch a reason to look beyond the faltering core
They do say a good walloping (from Colchester) does the players good!? It didn't do our players much good.Some didn't turn up for some matches....even though they were picked! You can't just pick and choose what games you wanted to PLAY in!
Of all the gutting things of last season, the fact that Wanyama didn't show up for the Colchester game is...okay, probably not even the top ten, but the moment he misplaced a pass so badly it went out for a throw-in and he just laughed really summed up what was going wrong at the time
"Former Tottenham Hotspur boss Mauricio Pochettino is being considered by both Manchester United and Manchester City. (Sunday Mirror)" 1. Citeh Pros = Sugga Daddy FC funding. Cons = VAR disabled against Spurs. 2, Utd Pros = Immense per season shoo-in penalty quota. Cons = Declining empire (think Poool 1990-97) . So how does Poch decide ....
Based on my previous essay, Man Utd would be terrible for Poch Considering his approach to transfers at Spurs boiled down to sign the players he wanted or sign no players at all, he simply wouldn't be afforded that at Man Utd and would have players imposed upon him as Pogba was for the most obvious example, which begs the question of whether he'd begrudgingly use one of those players but make sure to single them out for criticism when they play badly (which is what the ubermensch did with Pogba) or if he'd simply pretend he didn't exist like Martin Jol did with Comolli's attempts to play real life Football Manager And it has to be said that Poch is a manager who prefers a long term project, which he was afforded at Spurs as it was acknowledged he'd have to build something out of what the trio of AVB/Baldini/Sherwood left but what he did was forge a solid core out of what he had and improved the weaker components ahead of schedule, but at Man Utd both the club and their mentalist fanbase would want instant results and he wouldn't be afforded that, especially as it looks like he'd have to take a scythe to the squad given the reports of infighting - and while Poch ditching Pogba for van der Beek wouldn't get a reaction, if he were to dump De Gea for Henderson we'd no doubt have an increase in traffic from the Pond Life board regulars...
To an extent I think you’re right. It might depend a bit on whether he feels he can work with the players who are there, but it’s also true that you never know fully about the players until you’re actually managing the club. I think if he went there it would only depend on how much control he had. You could see a major step in him leaving us were his comments about not being manager any more, but only being a head coach once again. Poch wants a Ferguson-esque level on control at a club, and in that sense is very old school. I don’t think he’d get that at United. Personally I think he’d take one look at the clowns in charge at United and run a mile. The man is no fool. He needs a club that will buy into him and give him the leverage he needs to succeed. It’s hard to pick a role for him right now on that basis, tbh.