Totally agree and I think that it's important to make the distinction on incompetence between the football and financial operations of the company. You can easily make the case that they are connected, but it's hard to argue in which one we seem to be far more astute.
You kind of summarized my general feelings about Levy and ENIC. I think it's a combination of incompetence from a footballing perspective coupled with a desire for success but only within their preset financial parameters.
They got a lot of newbie gains from where the club was and frankly hit the jackpot with certain players and Poch during their tenure. Now that the league has become flooded with money and increased competition their old tricks just don't work anymore.
Exactly. Exactly.
Peak Poch success was buoyed by the fact that in the mid 2010s football management was nowhere near as advanced as it is even 8 years later, and Poch’s high pressing system was a rarity and a black swan in England (yes seriously). We got first mover advantage in a way before the Klopps Peps De Zerbis etc showed up.
But importantly, our success also relied upon ludicrous outperformance of transfer fees by literally every single one of the starting XI:
Lloris - £12m (considering he was an established international keeper and only 25, a literal steal that could never happen today)
Walker - £2m from Sheffield
Vertonghen - £15m from Ajax
Toby - £12m from Atletico (dodgy Southampton deal iirc)
Rose - £1m from Leeds
Dembele - £15m from Fulham
Dier - £3m from Sporting
Dele - £5m from MK Dons
Eriksen - £13m from Ajax
Son - £23m from Leverkusen
Kane - free.99
Again, every single player outperformed their fee by astounding amounts. I’d estimate that every single player I just listed was performing like a £40-50m player at bare minimum by 2016-17.
The thing is that this just isn’t possible anymore. Orban would be the most expensive player on this list and he’s a 21 year old with 30 matches of European football. Veliz cost as much as Eriksen and Dembele did.
It just isn’t at all feasible or financially realistic to build a title contender that way anymore. The only way to do so would be with a world class academy but when you look at the allocation of resources at Spurs Academy and the state of the coaching it’s obviously miles and miles off.