• The Fighting Cock is a forum for fans of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. Here you can discuss Spurs latest matches, our squad, tactics and any transfer news surrounding the club. Registration gives you access to all our forums (including 'Off Topic' discussion) and removes most of the adverts (you can remove them all via an account upgrade). You're here now, you might as well...

    Get involved!

Management ENIC

Latest Spurs videos from Sky Sports

ENIC In or ENIC Out


  • Total voters
    209
I honestly don’t know who else was in for Solanke. Maybe nobody. Doubt anyone who could afford the fee would want or need the player. Doesn’t derail my point though. Yes, our scouting has been, on the whole, shite. But do you honestly believe that the ownership aren’t trying to improve the football side? By spending hundreds of millions on players?

I just don’t think the whole set up is any good .

I’m sure they’d like to improve the squad yes but we don’t seem to have the right people in who are capable of doing that . I still find it amazing that we hired a manager who had no back room staff & we ended up with a bloke who got the sack from Hibs! It all feels very cheap & half arsed even though we are spending.
 
Watch the Son replacement be pathetic as well.

It’ll be some kid for a relatively high fee, or some domestic mid table player who is decent for 50-60m but commands 1/3 of the wage a Son would and has nowhere near the potential.

Losing two bonafide world class players and replacing them with Brennans or Solanke’s and we’re meant to see this as ambition .. meanwhile the wage bill shrinks ever smaller.
Son's replacement is playing for QPR at the moment!
 
Sell Harry Kane for £100 million

Replace him as our No1....12 months later.....with England's 5th choice striker.

Yeah..Definitely the sign of a club with sporting ambition :levylol:


Solanke is a West Ham level signing
And in May 2024 Big Dom was in talks with Waste Ham. Funny thing with our first choices, like Dom and Gray, they seem to be about to sign elsewhere purely as a prick tease 😛.
 
What's best for the club is to win the Premier League.

Wasn't it Brentford that we had to fight off to sign Solanke? IMO he's a mid table player, But you're right the owners probably think that with Solanke and Richarlison we're the envy of the league.

They have to spend a certain amount to keep the supporters content so we're getting players like those two to prove the club is serious about winning. I find it laughable.

So the only owners that want what’s best for their club are the ones that win the league? Forgive me but that’s mental.

I don’t believe they thought we’d be the envy of the league by signing Solanke. I’m clearly saying that spending £60m or whatever it was on him was a sign they are trying to improve the football team. If they weren’t, they’d have persisted with Richie, Son, Werner and youth players up front. We’d still have survived.

Are they doing things wrong? Of course. But they are trying. And failing.

I just don’t think the whole set up is any good .

I’m sure they’d like to improve the squad yes but we don’t seem to have the right people in who are capable of doing that . I still find it amazing that we hired a manager who had no back room staff & we ended up with a bloke who got the sack from Hibs! It all feels very cheap & half arsed even though we are spending.
Can’t argue with that I suppose.
 
I just don’t think the whole set up is any good .

I’m sure they’d like to improve the squad yes but we don’t seem to have the right people in who are capable of doing that . I still find it amazing that we hired a manager who had no back room staff & we ended up with a bloke who got the sack from Hibs! It all feels very cheap & half arsed even though we are spending.
Levy clearly got his fingers burned with compensating the staff behind Poch, Jose, Nuno and then Conte.

The guy can never admit to himself that he is just wrong; never mind admitting it to anyone else.
 
To be clear for those that can’t read….

I didn’t say Solanke was a statement signing.

I didn’t say he was a replacement for Kane.

I said he was a sign that the owner’s want what’s best for the football club (secondary to what’s best for the investment). If they didn’t care an iota about the club, they’d sign perfectly serviceable players, who’d keep us in the division, for a fraction of the cost of Solanke, Richarlison, TND, etc. But they don’t. They spend money to try to make the football club better.

Not seeing this is disingenuous, agenda driven, or downright stupid.
I like Solanke and I think he will come good.

But he fit within our wage structure. That’s the key point. Transfer fees are largely irrelevant. And our wage structure tends to favour what’s good for our board rather than what’s good for our competitive weight.
 
Don't get the vitriol, I am happy to support our owner, who is being attacked by certain groups with certain political leanings because he doesn't support the country they want him to support

Detroit Tigers Smile GIF by Bally Sports Detroit
 
Last time I checked, Brighton didn't reach a league cup Semi and weren't in the QF's of Europa. Our net spend over the last 5 years on transfers is HALF A BILLION. Brighton is 70m. We've spend almost double what Liverpool have.

Problem we have is that we cannot attract world class players. There are 10 clubs+ that they would prefer to play for; and without Champions League; we are not shopping in the same market as the top clubs - and therefore the fans need to temper their expectations. Spurs are NOT a big club with regards to achievements and reputation. They are a small club, that got lucky that Bale & Kane were world class players.

Smart transfer business means finding more Dele, Eriksen type deals; and investing in the academy to provide a steady flow of quality. Not spending money on players with big reputations or has-beens (.e.g. Felix, Coutinho, Sancho), and certainly not spending huge money on mid level journey men like Richarlison and Solanke.
I don't "expect" to win trophies in any given year, and any Spurs fan that says differently is probably being unreasonable. Until we start faking our accounts like so many others in the sport now, "expecting" a trophy is too much.


But...I expect that being the 8th/9th richest club in the world we, and 4th/5th/6th richest in England, we should always play in the Europa League at minimum (and be in the SF/Final when we do), play in the CL more often than not, reach the QF of any cup competition we're in, and be in the position that when opportunity falls in our lap we can seize it.

That last bit is the key. I've previously gone to great lengths to show that the difference between the ENIC era and the golden era of the club (1960-1985), isn't as huge as many think and basically comes down to this:

1960-1985, when we reached the SF of a competition we won more often than not.

Under ENIC, we've gotten in those positions nearly as frequently as we did in the golden era but have nearly always faltered.


Levy gets a lot of stick he doesn't deserve, i.e. people calling him the worst chairman in the sport. But he has always come up that little bit short, and all the glory lives in that little bit.
 
I like Solanke and I think he will come good.

But he fit within our wage structure. That’s the key point. Transfer fees are largely irrelevant. And our wage structure tends to favour what’s good for our board rather than what’s good for our competitive weight.
I recall those barren transfer windows when we were dishing out wage hikes to all and sundry but signing nobody. It was all about transfer fees then. Nobody had a clue what our wage to turnover ratio was.

Now, we’re spending g hundreds of millions (not close to irrelevant in anyone’s language, surely?) on fees but not enough on wages.

I get that the ideal is spend big on both and I expected us to do so when the new ground opened. We haven’t. Not sure why, but I and all other Spurs fans, were lied to.
 
I recall those barren transfer windows when we were dishing out wage hikes to all and sundry but signing nobody. It was all about transfer fees then. Nobody had a clue what our wage to turnover ratio was.

Now, we’re spending g hundreds of millions (not close to irrelevant in anyone’s language, surely?) on fees but not enough on wages.

I get that the ideal is spend big on both and I expected us to do so when the new ground opened. We haven’t. Not sure why, but I and all other Spurs fans, were lied to.
Wage bill has always been the clearest indicator of ambition. We’re the lowest in the league.

We haven’t done it because Levy’s entire approach to business is to remove any element of risk. A transfer fee is the cost of doing business. But a significant wage is a tangible risk that reduces your ability to move on a player (see Tanguy and someone like Rashford).

Levy won’t accept that risk.
 
Wage bill has always been the clearest indicator of ambition. We’re the lowest in the league.

We haven’t done it because Levy’s entire approach to business is to remove any element of risk. A transfer fee is the cost of doing business. But a significant wage is a tangible risk that reduces your ability to move on a player (see Tanguy and someone like Rashford).

Levy won’t accept that risk.
We don’t have the lowest wage bill in the league. Far from it. We have the lowest ratio of total football related wages to total turnover.

Take Tanguy as your example. His fee was just under 60m? His salary for the five years was around that too. Equal risk in that case. Son? Around 20m fee. Would now make 50m over 5 years? So a 30m difference. Is that the risk you are talking about? If so, it’s only 30m. You previously said hundreds of millions in fees were irrelevant, but now a paltry 30m over 5 years is a risk?

Again, we aren’t doing things correctly, but it’s not all down to wages to turnover ratios. We never even knew that was a thing until recently. Doubt we ever knew even what our wage bill was until recent years, let alone considered any kind of ratio as a marker of success.

I doubt the great Liverpool teams of the eighties were highest paid, as I doubt the ManU of the nineties were. Players wanted to play for the clubs and their managers. All this started with Chelsea, continued with Man City and has now become the norm. Hasn’t always been the case.
 
Sell Harry Kane for £100 million

Replace him as our No1....12 months later.....with England's 5th choice striker.

Yeah..Definitely the sign of a club with sporting ambition :levylol:


Solanke is a West Ham level signing
We had to hijack his move to West Ham, didn't we?

Even he thought he was a West Ham level player.
 
Ok. Thought we were having a good debate. I’ll leave it. Someone who sees shades of grey will be along sometime. Maybe.
To be honest I just don't have the energy, the counterpoints to your argument have been done to death. There's always shades of grey, of course, but we have to reach a conclusion. The club is richer than ever but worse on the pitch than we've been for about 20 years. Some of that on Ange but this is the ENIC end game. Assets soaring in value, team floundering. I feel we've all reached the conclusions we're going to.

GRG3gT1aIAAtFR1.jpg
 
Back
Top