Our acadamy has been poor in all my time as a Spurs fan which is since 1967
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Transfers January 2022 - Transfer Window
- Thread starter The Fighting Cock
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When have they ever kept to, or been worried about limits imposed on them?
I don't catch this differentiation based on nationality
This summer seemingly...... Note peps very public song n dance about finances and trf fees.
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The theory is fine - and pre-Poch a number of the academy had playing time both in first team and on loan. Poch sold all those not kept for first team (Kane ) selling the likes of Townsend, Mason, Bentaleb, (the latter two forming Poch's CM for his first season) Carroll, Veljkovic and others for £100m (sadly then wasted on buying Sissoko, Autrier etc).
However no manager since about 2015 has given much quality time to the youngsters, and hence none have come through (other than Winks under Poch) - although t be fair Mourhino's re-starting loans has given us Skipp and several others who are 'work in progress'; .
So the theory works - £100m generated from developing players we didn't want to keep whilst keeping a one time world class Kane.
The practice doesn't when manager doesn't want to bring youngsters through
9m for Pritchard in pre-Neymar money takes some beating.
Neither here nor there. That said you're ignoring the fact that be it Kane, Winks, Mason, Bentaleb, Andros, KWP, Onomah, Carrol, Skipp, Caulker, Livermore.... We've kicked out a decent stream of HG players that have contributed on the pitch and/or financially speaking.
Whether players make the starting XI or are sold they're still contributing to the bigger picture.
Whether it achieves that particular goal of helping us avoid the HG market or not, us investing in the academy is not a stick to beat us with.
This is all fine and of course I agree generally.
But where we find ourselves is hard, hard up against the HG limits with Dele and Winks being the first two names on the sell list.
And we know Daniel Levy. What he sees in English players is a totally irrational, randomly fluctuating market. He's not going to pay the premium for Max Aarons and then take a bath on Harry Winks when in Levy's mind the difference is just a temporary illusion of form.
And so he defiantly holds out. Just like the stadium naming rights. He knows better than the market.
And then circumstances arise where he can live his true passion and leverage a club's weakness to extract a low price, and we end up with Ryan Sessegnon. In Levy's mind Sess' total failure upon exposure to the PL is just statistical noise allowing him to acquire an asset at an artificially deflated price. As ever, a non-football guy who only knows enough to be dangerous.
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.......But how does any of this correlate to your theory that implies that we only have the academy to avoid HG premiums?
.......And even if was our a primary motivation; why should trying to avoid those costs be a bad thing?
There's literally no up-side to opposite and meanwhile if it succeeds it can only lead to us being able to divert our budget towards the acquisition of higher grade talent.
Even if we just sign two players in January (all I'm expecting), one of them absolutely needs to count as HG, because otherwise Conte's hands are going to be significantly tied in overhauling the squad in the summer.
I know he wants to bring in loads of Italians, and they might count as better values, but holy shit we need the freedom afforded by extra HG players to call an end on the Winks and Dele era at Spurs.
Rhetorical (not rhetorical) question... Who?
I see it as way more plausible that we hit our HG targets by means of secondary talent/depth players rather than prime first team acquisitions.
1. More to choose from on the international market.
2. Cheaper.
How many HG players right now would peeps really want for our first XI; how many of them would come here and how many of them could we afford? Pretty tiny list.....
Does he though?
Vhalovic is Serbian for starters and he's the only recurring name atm. Meanwhile he brought a fair few players from the EPL to Italy when at Inter..... Lukaku, Sanchez, Young, Eriksen.
The same was said about Paratici in the summer, but of the 5 players we bought, 2 were from La Liga and one was form France.
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To be clear I fully support our investment in our academy, which is the correct call and if anything we should push further. I think time has revealed the wisdom in the Chelsea "loan army" approach.
The academy hasn't been especially productive, but that's no reason to give up.
Still, in any event, even the most productive academy is going to need to be supplemented by paying over the odds for English players to fill the HG quotas in a side that wants to compete at the top of the PL. There is no One Weird Trick around that.
Again, wish away the reality of the HGP rules all you want, but they're there.
Part of the relative cheapness of foreign players IS the mandate that they be supplemented by the more limited English market.
If Ben White and Cristian Romero are equal players, White IS worth more.
And anyway, I see adding English players we don't think are first team quality to long-term contracts and still having to pay meaningful fees for them as a terrible idea. We need 2-3 long term HGP contributors. Our Paratici/Conte present is an inconvenient moment for that to be the case. Poor planning chickens come home to roost.
There isn't, I just don't see where you conjure your theory from as if it's somehow exclusive to Spurs or some form of Levy-fuckery.....
Every club in the land would rather produce their HG players rather than pay a premium to buy them.
As per my post to
VirginiaSpur
above.... If we can avoid buying HG for prime positions then we stand to save a fortune and have more to spread around the squad overall.Example: Max Aarons £40m..... Emerson £22m instead... Promote Skipp...... Money saved/HG balanced.
Better still, don't stifle KWP like a bunch of dumb-asses only to then sell him and spend even more money on Doherty (who's only semi-HG).
I never said that.
What's a fact is that Spurs are up a creek on HG's. We have no choice but to pay the English Tax.
There are plenty of guys in Championship that don't come with an English tax. Hell with how little Dele and Winks contribute just sign some random unsigned guy and we are no worse off anyways.
That's the least pertinent aspect of my post, but ok.....
The implication was absolutely there..... Like it was somehow some flawed, quasi-devious scheme when in truth you're merely highlighted the general purpose of an academy.
Again.... See my point above.....
One end of the scale is paying 100m for Rice when you could get a similar level player from Europe for half that amount.... The other is signing someone like Bowen/Eze/Olise before they hit the EPL and get a decent little player without breaking the bank.
If we're smart and scout well this needn't be some major HG crisis.....
We have 2 HG players to replace.
.....And a bunch of of non-HG that are also expendable at this juncture.
It's not an insurmountable situation where we've suddenly found that our first XI needs must be addressed by HG purchases.
You have correctly made this point in other contexts: don't sign bad players.
Anyone who is any good in the Championship does come at a premium.
And when you look at Grealish, Maddison, Aarons, Bowen, Benrahma, Watkins, Eze, the list goes on and on, there's a ton of value in acquiring those players.
We bought Sessegnon and Clarke. And Steve Hitchen is still our chief scout.
Neither flawed nor devious. Insufficient.
To flog another one of my hobby horses, because here we are again, our well-resourced academy is another way in which ENIC's Spurs are Manchester City or PSG in absolutely every way, at the bleeding edge of every best practice trend in the business and operations of being a glittering globally elite football club maximizing its revenue to the penny, with the lone exception of expenditures on first team players.
I don't think it has to be bad players but if you upgrade a position with a foreign player then adding a HG player that is the 25th man on the roster is fine.
If we replace Doherty with someone like Nathaniel Clyne, who's contract is up, how much worse are we? If it allows us to then upgrade from Dier to a quality foreign CB isn't that worth it?
We currently have zero strikers behind Kane. If we sell Dele, bring in Vlahovic and add some one like Jay Rodriguez, again contract ending this summer, as our 3rd/4th choice striker are we worse off?
When we have HG guys that offer nothing- Winks, Dele and plenty of foreign guys that offer nothing- Doherty, Gollini, Rodon plus many debatable guys- Sanchez, Dier, GLC, Ndombele. There is a not a need to bring in superstars in the HG department.
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As for Championship players having a premium none of Eze, Olise, Bowen, Watkins cost a ton of money.