In interest of finding an effective transfer strategy for Spurs I’ve looked at how Leverkusen and Napoli established their league winning sides. Both are teams that I think are in a relatively similar position to Spurs: Napoli needed Maradona to win them their only titles before 22/23, and “Neverkusen” who were always considered a step below the elite German clubs. I basically looked at when they acquired their key personnel for their title winning squads, their cost, their age, and where they bought them from. Note that there’s a tiny bit of rounding with the cost cause I didn’t feel like doing decimals.
First Leverkusen:
15/16:
Jonathan Tah 19, 10m from Hamburger SV
19/20:
Tapsoba 20, 20m from Vit. Guimaraes
Moussa Diaby 19, 15m from PSG (not on their winning squad actually, but worth noting cause they sold him for a huge profit the year they won the league, which allowed them more flexibility in the transfer market)
Palacios 21, 17m from River Plate
Wirtz 16, 200k from Koln (to their youth squad, he was later promoted)
20/21:
Shick 24, 26m from Roma
Frimpong 20, 11m from Celtic
21/22:
Kossounou 20, 23m from Brugge
Hincapie 19, 6m from Talleres
Andrich 26, 7m from Union Berlin
Adli 21, 8m from Toulouse
22/23:
Hlozek 19, 13m from Sparta Prague
23/24:
Boniface 22, 22m from Union SG
Granit Xhaka 30, 15m from Woolwich
Grimaldo 27, free transfer from Benfica
Jonas Hofmann 30, 10m from Gladbach
Napoli:
16/17:
Zielinski 22, 16m from Udinese
17/18:
Mario Rui 26, 6m from Roma
19/20:
Lozano 24, 45m from PSV
Lobotka 25, 26m from Udinese
Di Lorenzo 25, 10m from Empoli
Meret 22, 26m from Udinese (was loaned a year before)
Elmas 19, 18m from Besiktas
Rrahmani 25, 14m from Verona
20/21:
Osimhen 21, 78m from Lille
21/22:
Matteo Politano 27, 22m from Inter
22/23
Min-Jae Kim 25, 19m from Fenerbahce
Anguissa 26, 16m from Fulham (though they loaned him from Fulham a season before)
Kvaratskhelia 21, 13m Dinamo Batumi
Mathias Olivera 24, 17m from Getafe
Some thoughts:
Both clubs seemingly had very different transfer strategies. Leverkusen went pretty hard for youth, while Napoli took on more established players. Despite being very youth focused, on their title winning season Leverkusen added 3 experienced players: Xhaka, Grimaldo, and Hofmann, all from big clubs or Woolwich, and perhaps that’s what they needed to get them over the line once their youth project was hitting critical mass.
Napoli’s main startegy was seemingly buying from Serie A, both from smaller clubs (Udinese appears 3 times on the list, I’d have put out a restraining order), and a few out of favor players from bigger clubs like Politano and Mario Rui. With that they’ve made some purchases from what I’d call “Europa League” clubs, like Besiktas, PSV, Lille, and Fenerbahce. Osimhen is kind of a massive outlier, there’s a rumour that the fee was inflated for FFP reasons, considering they sold 10m worth of reserve players to Lille in the same window.
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