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Sure beats “ considering “ or “ weighing up “
It is definitely better than that
The protest is going ahead, the details are being finalised.
Whelp, since becoming a fan of Tottenham Hotspurs because of Kane, Son, Erikson, Alli, Poch, (is Sonny really the only one still there?) and not having any league in America that has relegation in its vocabulary (fans of teams with bad decades long runs just have to learn to be basement clubs), it's difficult to understand that Spurs might not be in Premier League next season....
I blame Levy.
To my basic knowledge of (soccer) English football, I think Levy firing Pochetino was and still is a stupid mistake, and now with the new stadium, Levy has guided this team into possible Relegation. Unbelievable.
I blame Levy.
I blame Levy.
To my basic knowledge of (soccer) English football, I think Levy firing Pochetino was and still is a stupid mistake, and now with the new stadium, Levy has guided this team into possible Relegation. Unbelievable.
I blame Levy.
Uber-Gooner Ian Wright now being lauded on a spurs forum.
Fucking hell.
To be fair, Ian Wright comes across as a decent guy. Rarely a knob…. unlike the rest of the mouthy wankers.
Our wage to profit ratio (or could be revenue) is one of the lowest in the league - I think around 48% or something like that. Our rivals who have won trophies in recent years pay higher wages. That’s not because Levy is not ‘good with his football analysis’. Its a deliberate strategy. If you or I ran the club we would focus on winning trophies whilst looking to keep the club financially afloat. We’d buy the best players and managers that we could. But Levy doesn’t think like us.
Can’t you see that his first priority is to run the club as profitably as possible and increase its value. For years he has given the appearance to us fans that the new stadium and additional money spins offs would be ploughed back into the team. Have you seen any of that??
He said himself that he and Lewis aren't particularly keen on football and they only got involved to profit from it's global popularity.
Which part of that are you finding it difficult to understand?
Agreed. It's an accounting loss due to amortisation of the stadium
I think you can remove the "Maybe"
The issue is the extent to which Levy should have a smaller paper gain (to be realised one day), and put more of that into the club to bring us in line with our peer group.
There are ways of doing it. And potentially Levy isn't even profit maximising - it might be his capital gain could be increased if the team were successful on the pitch.
Says the bloke who still can't get his head around the term 'anchor tennant'!
Time to actually walk the walk
Enough is enough , I shall be going to this , and I won't be buying a ticket for the match
Does this guy never tire of getting mugged off in public time and again? I guess the prospect of being a billionaire when he sells up, and buying his first superyacht might give him an unmatched propensity to eat shit in the football world, but he really the cuck of European football.
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I don't think he had any perception he was genuinely unpopular among his normal matchgoing customers until pretty recently.
I don't think people who have been arguing about this on the internet for decades fully realize how much the worm has turned in the last 12-24 months
Sadly it seems players also know it’s a clown show over here not just the fans and the media. It’s full naked emperor.
His capital gain might be increased but much less in comparison to his Real Estate Portfolio. Remember, If he does sell the FC, he doesn't necessarily have to sell the Hotels, food stalls, gocart track..... He can even negotiate terms on the stadium.
It's way more profitable to get all things going, not spend the money on the team and enjoy increased revenue when the new owner turn the team around. He's about money and nothing else.
This.
People would be surprised for out of touch people of Daniel's wealth class are. They live in their own reality where it is inconceivable that people do not like them.
Amongst the various (often valid) complaints about the way Levy runs the club, this to me is the biggest failure.
This is how an owner should run a fucking football club - by appointing the smartest people in the business, and allowing them to run the football side of the business.
The annoying thing is that Levy was in some ways ahead of this curve, hiring Arrnesen etc, he even had Michael Edwards at Spurs FFS. And being early innovators of the DOF model and data recruitment through people like Commolli and hiring promising young coaches like AVB and Poch actually took us to a pinnacle in 2016-17 - but it's like Levy unlearned every fucking thing he learned - regressed to letting "coaches (Poch) become managers, then hiring "managers" and people like " Paratici "who's in my contact book" recruiting.
You read the first couple of paragraphs of this, and imagine Hughes sitting down talking understanding of the game and a 60 page dossier all about why he believes in Slot, and then imagine 12 months prior Levy sitting down trying to convince Slot.
It's just so fucking typical of Levy. He was on the right track with Slot, but as with everything it's fucking "nearly" but failure because the fucker just won't fucking do things properly and hire right people.
This is almost certainly what happened with RKM and Tel. Can you imagine Levy trying to sell our fucking project with his homework anecdotes?
Very shrewd businessman, but the charisma of fucking snooker chalk. Good with money, but football is also a "people" business, and Levy just doesn't have it.
This is why Liverpool have been successful.
Last Spring, in his old, characterful mansion house in the centre of Zwolle, Arne Slot sat down with Richard Hughes. Daniel Levy had attempted the same mission the previous year but was unable to persuade Slot to leave Feyenoord.
A colleague believes Hughes “should be getting f***ing knighted” for what happened next. It was the Scotsman’s first major task as Liverpool’s sporting director and he nailed it, that afternoon, in Slot’s family home. Two retired midfielders, multilingual, analytical and from middle-class backgrounds, bonded over common ground, not least their addiction to the game.
“I had a very good relationship from the start with Richard, which is one of the reasons I loved to join the club,” Slot said on why he chose Liverpool.
In that meeting, his big question was “why me?” Glad you asked, Hughes replied, laying down a 60-page dossier Liverpool compiled on him. When Slot opined that one of his strengths was improving players, Hughes said “we agree” and directed him to the section packed with stats and personal testimonies which supported that view. Slot was blown away.
The previous summer, Hughes led another head coach hire. Then, as Bournemouth’s technical director, he made a bold proposal to the owner Bill Foley that he should replace Gary O’Neil with Andoni Iraola. O’Neil is Hughes’s friend but business is business. Iraola was simply further along in his career trajectory and Hughes had the contacts and relationships in Spain to believe he could get him.
Any sane observer would conclude that someone able to sign the Premier League’s two hottest coaches, one after another, was quite good at their job. A glance at Liverpool’s league position and the riches in the Bournemouth squad Hughes assembled might strengthen that belief.
But there is madness in the football debate caused by a modern need for gratification through transfers. Hughes is called “useless” and “missing” by a section of Liverpool fans on social media for (in their minds) not doing enough of them. Forget results, forget Slot’s caviar football: where are our deals?
It is not a view shared by Michael Edwards, chief executive of football at Liverpool’s owners, FSG. He was arguably the best sporting director the Premier League has seen when he did Hughes’s job from 2016 to 2022, having joined the club in 2011. Famed for deals ahead of the curve his belief is that appointing Hughes last March was another example. After all, if Hughes was at still Bournemouth big clubs would be fighting to hire him given how the project he put together is performing.
Edwards and Hughes go back two decades to when Edwards was Portsmouth’s performance analyst and Hughes their captain. After training, Pompey’s senior pros would file into Edwards’ room: O’Neil, Hughes, Matt Taylor, David James and — carrying a copy of the Times or Guardian, for which he was teased — Eddie Howe. These were the guys who most loved football and getting into the detail of the game.
Howe brought Hughes into Bournemouth’s recruitment set-up after his retirement from playing and Hughes became Bournemouth technical director in 2014. Edwards, building Liverpool at the time, was struck by how often he ran into his old friend during the final yards of deals.
Bournemouth were Liverpool’s main competition when he signed Joe Gomez, Andrew Robertson and Harvey Elliott. When he went for Lloyd Kelly at Bristol City, Hughes got there first: that one still rankles. David Brooks and Ryan Christie were others Edwards was considering when Bournemouth beat them to the punch. Before he joined Liverpool, exploiting doubts at Southampton about the player, Hughes almost pulled off a remarkable deal for Sadio Mané.
Back when Virgil van Dijk was at Celtic, Hughes told Edwards to sign him. He was a sounding board when Edwards was plotting the recruitment of Mohamed Salah and Alisson from Roma. Raised in Italy (where his father Kevin worked in publishing) Hughes was a youth player at Atalanta, and later a Serie A pundit for BT Sport, and he was raving to Edwards about Roberto De Zerbi long before De Zerbi’s breakthrough job at Sassuolo.
De Zerbi had committed to joining Bournemouth, only for a delay with Foley’s takeover to allow Brighton the opportunity to hire him first.
Knowing all this, and remembering how Hughes stood out among their peers at Premier League sporting director meetings, Edwards could not understand why he was not prime target when Liverpool began headhunting a new sporting director last season. Candidates being interviewed, such as Paul Mitchell and Markus Krösche, would not fit the club and its culture nearly so well, Edwards believed. And so when FSG brought Edwards back last March, recruiting Hughes was his key decision.
A sparky and forthright character, Edwards acknowledges Hughes has soft skills superior to his own and when the pair — plus Will Spearman’s data department — agreed Slot was the outstanding candidate to replace Jürgen Klopp, Edwards saw Hughes as best equipped to sell Slot Liverpool’s project face-to-face.
Liverpool have a checklist of around 20 different elements they seek in a head coach. Interestingly in one category, player availability, another candidate — Ruben Amorim — rated best in Europe. But Slot still scored very highly there and topped nearly all the others, especially impressing in Liverpool’s model measuring over-performance and improvement of players.
Hughes needed no convincing about the latter. At Bournemouth, he got to know Slot’s work only too well, signing two talents Slot developed at Feyenoord — Marcos Senesi and (via Leeds) Luis Sinisterra — and pursuing others such as Marcus Pedersen and Quilindschy Hartman. He ended up telling Bournemouth’s scouts to stop recommending Feyenoord players “because it’s the coach there who makes them look good”.
Criticism of Hughes began after he was part of a two-man delegation who flew to San Sebastian in late July to try to sign Martin Zubimendi but returned empty handed, after Zubimendi decided he could not bring himself to put in the transfer request necessary to trigger a €60million buyout clause at his boyhood club, Real Sociedad.
It intensified when Liverpool signalled they would not be pursuing secondary targets. Hughes assessed the market and decided options such as Manuel Ugarte were not appropriate for Slot’s dynamic, ball-progressing, possession-based style and Liverpool already had a player with the very profile of the type of No6 Slot needed.
That was Ryan Gravenberch. He was late returning for pre-season so Slot needed a little time to work with him to be convinced — but very soon was. That ability to improve footballers has allowed Slot to nurture Gravenberch into arguably Europe’s best holding player, in the injury absence of Manchester City’s Rodri. “It was clear [improving players] was one of Arne’s superpowers so why would you stop him using it by just buying?” said a source, regarding Hughes’ measured approach to transfers at Liverpool.
They point to the deals Hughes has done. To meet Slot’s demand for six top attackers he signed the best Italian talent of his generation, Federico Chiesa, for a knockdown £10million. It was factored in that, after a couple of injury-hit seasons, Chiesa would arrive lacking fitness. The target was always for him to be properly ready by January, and against PSV Eindhoven on Wednesday he played his first 90 minutes for Liverpool.
Hughes also signed Giorgi Mamardashvili, assessed by Liverpool’s scouting and data to have been best young goalkeeper in the world over the previous 12 months. It was for the “mad” price of £25million — exploiting financial problems at Valencia, where Mamardashvili remained on loan for 2024-25. The Georgian represents good forward planning given Alisson, now 32, will soon enter the final two years of his contract.
At Liverpool’s AXA Training Centre, where his office on the first floor is next door to Slot’s, Hughes has reorganised departments and revamped staff, installing David Woodfine as assistant sporting director and recruiting Mark Burchill and Craig McKee as senior scouts. Both helped him assemble a Bournemouth squad stocked with talents, such as Antoine Semenyo and Milos Kerkez, coveted by big clubs.
And then there is sales, the underestimated part of a sporting director’s job. Bringing in €47million for Sepp van den Berg and Fabio Carvalho seems business almost Edwards-esque. Again, you look back to Hughes’s work at Bournemouth: “flipping” Tyrone Mings (signed for £8million, sold for £25million), Aaron Ramsdale (signed for £800,000, sold for £18.5million) and others.
Asked to describe himself Edwards might say, albeit with a smile, “ruthless”. If you know him, you know friendship would be bottom of his reasons for making business decisions. It was not why Hughes was hired. But their close relationship might help Liverpool’s ownership and football department navigate, with a united front, the treacherous waters around Salah, Van Dijk and Trent Alexander-Arnold. That all three ended last season with only 12 months on their contracts was not a problem of Hughes and Edwards’ making. Like being “thrown a shit sandwich” is one well-placed view.
Liverpool want the trio to stay and Hughes is leading negotiations to try to make that happen but players have got to want to stay. Alexander-Arnold is considering interest from Real Madrid and the first time Salah clarified his desire to remain at Liverpool was on the pitch at Old Trafford, in a TV interview after Liverpool won there in September.
At Liverpool, where there is no state or oligarch funding, they know “you can’t spend the money twice” and as much as, for example, Salah, is valued, no player can be handed a contract that risks the club’s financial health and long-term stability. An example borne in mind is the mess Woolwich got into after handing mega-deals to Mesut Özil and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang.
Liverpool don’t envisage being active before the end of this window — only something completely out of the blue would change things. They believe in their squad, its quality, its depth, and see no sense in major changes until the futures of the big three are resolved.
However, their long-term work involves succession-planning for every position and if any of the trio leave, the list of options to replace them will be at the ready. But the view is that the surest way to retain stars is by creating football conditions that make them want to be there, and appointing the right head coach is the start.
The man who landed Slot has much to do but “useless?” His doings so far don’t suggest that.
This is how an owner should run a fucking football club - by appointing the smartest people in the business, and allowing them to run the football side of the business.
The annoying thing is that Levy was in some ways ahead of this curve, hiring Arrnesen etc, he even had Michael Edwards at Spurs FFS. And being early innovators of the DOF model and data recruitment through people like Commolli and hiring promising young coaches like AVB and Poch actually took us to a pinnacle in 2016-17 - but it's like Levy unlearned every fucking thing he learned - regressed to letting "coaches (Poch) become managers, then hiring "managers" and people like " Paratici "who's in my contact book" recruiting.
You read the first couple of paragraphs of this, and imagine Hughes sitting down talking understanding of the game and a 60 page dossier all about why he believes in Slot, and then imagine 12 months prior Levy sitting down trying to convince Slot.
It's just so fucking typical of Levy. He was on the right track with Slot, but as with everything it's fucking "nearly" but failure because the fucker just won't fucking do things properly and hire right people.
This is almost certainly what happened with RKM and Tel. Can you imagine Levy trying to sell our fucking project with his homework anecdotes?
Very shrewd businessman, but the charisma of fucking snooker chalk. Good with money, but football is also a "people" business, and Levy just doesn't have it.
This is why Liverpool have been successful.
Why Liverpool trust Richard Hughes, the man who signed Slot and Iraola
January 31 2025, 1.00pm GMTLast Spring, in his old, characterful mansion house in the centre of Zwolle, Arne Slot sat down with Richard Hughes. Daniel Levy had attempted the same mission the previous year but was unable to persuade Slot to leave Feyenoord.
A colleague believes Hughes “should be getting f***ing knighted” for what happened next. It was the Scotsman’s first major task as Liverpool’s sporting director and he nailed it, that afternoon, in Slot’s family home. Two retired midfielders, multilingual, analytical and from middle-class backgrounds, bonded over common ground, not least their addiction to the game.
“I had a very good relationship from the start with Richard, which is one of the reasons I loved to join the club,” Slot said on why he chose Liverpool.
In that meeting, his big question was “why me?” Glad you asked, Hughes replied, laying down a 60-page dossier Liverpool compiled on him. When Slot opined that one of his strengths was improving players, Hughes said “we agree” and directed him to the section packed with stats and personal testimonies which supported that view. Slot was blown away.
The previous summer, Hughes led another head coach hire. Then, as Bournemouth’s technical director, he made a bold proposal to the owner Bill Foley that he should replace Gary O’Neil with Andoni Iraola. O’Neil is Hughes’s friend but business is business. Iraola was simply further along in his career trajectory and Hughes had the contacts and relationships in Spain to believe he could get him.
Any sane observer would conclude that someone able to sign the Premier League’s two hottest coaches, one after another, was quite good at their job. A glance at Liverpool’s league position and the riches in the Bournemouth squad Hughes assembled might strengthen that belief.
But there is madness in the football debate caused by a modern need for gratification through transfers. Hughes is called “useless” and “missing” by a section of Liverpool fans on social media for (in their minds) not doing enough of them. Forget results, forget Slot’s caviar football: where are our deals?
It is not a view shared by Michael Edwards, chief executive of football at Liverpool’s owners, FSG. He was arguably the best sporting director the Premier League has seen when he did Hughes’s job from 2016 to 2022, having joined the club in 2011. Famed for deals ahead of the curve his belief is that appointing Hughes last March was another example. After all, if Hughes was at still Bournemouth big clubs would be fighting to hire him given how the project he put together is performing.
Edwards and Hughes go back two decades to when Edwards was Portsmouth’s performance analyst and Hughes their captain. After training, Pompey’s senior pros would file into Edwards’ room: O’Neil, Hughes, Matt Taylor, David James and — carrying a copy of the Times or Guardian, for which he was teased — Eddie Howe. These were the guys who most loved football and getting into the detail of the game.
Howe brought Hughes into Bournemouth’s recruitment set-up after his retirement from playing and Hughes became Bournemouth technical director in 2014. Edwards, building Liverpool at the time, was struck by how often he ran into his old friend during the final yards of deals.
Bournemouth were Liverpool’s main competition when he signed Joe Gomez, Andrew Robertson and Harvey Elliott. When he went for Lloyd Kelly at Bristol City, Hughes got there first: that one still rankles. David Brooks and Ryan Christie were others Edwards was considering when Bournemouth beat them to the punch. Before he joined Liverpool, exploiting doubts at Southampton about the player, Hughes almost pulled off a remarkable deal for Sadio Mané.
Back when Virgil van Dijk was at Celtic, Hughes told Edwards to sign him. He was a sounding board when Edwards was plotting the recruitment of Mohamed Salah and Alisson from Roma. Raised in Italy (where his father Kevin worked in publishing) Hughes was a youth player at Atalanta, and later a Serie A pundit for BT Sport, and he was raving to Edwards about Roberto De Zerbi long before De Zerbi’s breakthrough job at Sassuolo.
De Zerbi had committed to joining Bournemouth, only for a delay with Foley’s takeover to allow Brighton the opportunity to hire him first.
Knowing all this, and remembering how Hughes stood out among their peers at Premier League sporting director meetings, Edwards could not understand why he was not prime target when Liverpool began headhunting a new sporting director last season. Candidates being interviewed, such as Paul Mitchell and Markus Krösche, would not fit the club and its culture nearly so well, Edwards believed. And so when FSG brought Edwards back last March, recruiting Hughes was his key decision.
A sparky and forthright character, Edwards acknowledges Hughes has soft skills superior to his own and when the pair — plus Will Spearman’s data department — agreed Slot was the outstanding candidate to replace Jürgen Klopp, Edwards saw Hughes as best equipped to sell Slot Liverpool’s project face-to-face.
Liverpool have a checklist of around 20 different elements they seek in a head coach. Interestingly in one category, player availability, another candidate — Ruben Amorim — rated best in Europe. But Slot still scored very highly there and topped nearly all the others, especially impressing in Liverpool’s model measuring over-performance and improvement of players.
Hughes needed no convincing about the latter. At Bournemouth, he got to know Slot’s work only too well, signing two talents Slot developed at Feyenoord — Marcos Senesi and (via Leeds) Luis Sinisterra — and pursuing others such as Marcus Pedersen and Quilindschy Hartman. He ended up telling Bournemouth’s scouts to stop recommending Feyenoord players “because it’s the coach there who makes them look good”.
Criticism of Hughes began after he was part of a two-man delegation who flew to San Sebastian in late July to try to sign Martin Zubimendi but returned empty handed, after Zubimendi decided he could not bring himself to put in the transfer request necessary to trigger a €60million buyout clause at his boyhood club, Real Sociedad.
It intensified when Liverpool signalled they would not be pursuing secondary targets. Hughes assessed the market and decided options such as Manuel Ugarte were not appropriate for Slot’s dynamic, ball-progressing, possession-based style and Liverpool already had a player with the very profile of the type of No6 Slot needed.
That was Ryan Gravenberch. He was late returning for pre-season so Slot needed a little time to work with him to be convinced — but very soon was. That ability to improve footballers has allowed Slot to nurture Gravenberch into arguably Europe’s best holding player, in the injury absence of Manchester City’s Rodri. “It was clear [improving players] was one of Arne’s superpowers so why would you stop him using it by just buying?” said a source, regarding Hughes’ measured approach to transfers at Liverpool.
They point to the deals Hughes has done. To meet Slot’s demand for six top attackers he signed the best Italian talent of his generation, Federico Chiesa, for a knockdown £10million. It was factored in that, after a couple of injury-hit seasons, Chiesa would arrive lacking fitness. The target was always for him to be properly ready by January, and against PSV Eindhoven on Wednesday he played his first 90 minutes for Liverpool.
Hughes also signed Giorgi Mamardashvili, assessed by Liverpool’s scouting and data to have been best young goalkeeper in the world over the previous 12 months. It was for the “mad” price of £25million — exploiting financial problems at Valencia, where Mamardashvili remained on loan for 2024-25. The Georgian represents good forward planning given Alisson, now 32, will soon enter the final two years of his contract.
At Liverpool’s AXA Training Centre, where his office on the first floor is next door to Slot’s, Hughes has reorganised departments and revamped staff, installing David Woodfine as assistant sporting director and recruiting Mark Burchill and Craig McKee as senior scouts. Both helped him assemble a Bournemouth squad stocked with talents, such as Antoine Semenyo and Milos Kerkez, coveted by big clubs.
And then there is sales, the underestimated part of a sporting director’s job. Bringing in €47million for Sepp van den Berg and Fabio Carvalho seems business almost Edwards-esque. Again, you look back to Hughes’s work at Bournemouth: “flipping” Tyrone Mings (signed for £8million, sold for £25million), Aaron Ramsdale (signed for £800,000, sold for £18.5million) and others.
Asked to describe himself Edwards might say, albeit with a smile, “ruthless”. If you know him, you know friendship would be bottom of his reasons for making business decisions. It was not why Hughes was hired. But their close relationship might help Liverpool’s ownership and football department navigate, with a united front, the treacherous waters around Salah, Van Dijk and Trent Alexander-Arnold. That all three ended last season with only 12 months on their contracts was not a problem of Hughes and Edwards’ making. Like being “thrown a shit sandwich” is one well-placed view.
Liverpool want the trio to stay and Hughes is leading negotiations to try to make that happen but players have got to want to stay. Alexander-Arnold is considering interest from Real Madrid and the first time Salah clarified his desire to remain at Liverpool was on the pitch at Old Trafford, in a TV interview after Liverpool won there in September.
At Liverpool, where there is no state or oligarch funding, they know “you can’t spend the money twice” and as much as, for example, Salah, is valued, no player can be handed a contract that risks the club’s financial health and long-term stability. An example borne in mind is the mess Woolwich got into after handing mega-deals to Mesut Özil and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang.
Liverpool don’t envisage being active before the end of this window — only something completely out of the blue would change things. They believe in their squad, its quality, its depth, and see no sense in major changes until the futures of the big three are resolved.
However, their long-term work involves succession-planning for every position and if any of the trio leave, the list of options to replace them will be at the ready. But the view is that the surest way to retain stars is by creating football conditions that make them want to be there, and appointing the right head coach is the start.
The man who landed Slot has much to do but “useless?” His doings so far don’t suggest that.