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- Nov 28, 2004
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/fo...ck-in-contentment-at-his-Tottenham-years.html
Sunday Telegraph - 14/12/08
When Damien Comolli was sacked as Tottenham’s sporting director at the end of October, the whoops of Eurosceptic glee were barely suppressed. The continental system of managing a football club had failed: out went Juande Ramos and Comolli, in came Harry Redknapp to sort things out in the traditional way. Results improved dramatically, so vindication surely that the system had been inherently flawed all along, another fancy foreign experiment gone wrong?
Comolli, in his first interview since leaving Spurs, offers a powerful rebuttal to the charge that his recruitment policy was flawed and argues cogently that he has given the club a robust legacy that will sustain Tottenham for years, if not decades to come. It might be painful watching from the outside but Comolli is proud to see the players he worked so hard to bring to White Hart Lane in such fine fettle.
“I’m pleased when I see Woodgate doing fantastically, Assou-Ekotto playing well; I thought Zokora was outstanding last week [against West Ham]. And Corluka, Modric, all of them. I’m very pleased. When I made mistakes I knew it quite quickly. I don’t think I made many mistakes. The players who are still there and playing, I knew they had the quality. Sorry, I don’t mean to sound arrogant by saying that, but that’s the way I felt. I’m pleased the players are doing well, but not surprised. I’m not surprised that Darren Bent has scored 12 goals this seasons. I knew he would score goals.”
The repeated fallacy about Comolli’s role was that he signed players without the manager’s agreement. Daniel Levy, the Spurs chairman, denied that emphatically last month, but Comolli struggled to shift public perception that he was responsible only for the signings that didn’t come off.
“I think it is part of the role of being sporting director. What works has nothing to do with you but what doesn’t work, you have to take the blame.
‘’Overall, in terms of trading, it worked well. As far as I’m concerned I probably made about three or four mistakes out of 25 first-team deals during my time. Some of those I consider mistakes now, could turn out to be a success in the future. You never know – that’s the beauty with players, especially young ones.
“In pure business terms, my work was very profitable for the club. There is quality in the team and there is value. For the three or four mistakes I made, I’m sure overall it is very positive for the club. You’re not in Europe three years in a row and winning a trophy unless you get the right players.” There were few deals that went more right for Tottenham than the signing of Dimitar Berbatov, a terrific coup for Comolli, so it was ironic that the machinations surrounding the Bulgarian’s summer move to Manchester United proved so instrumental in the team’s crash in form and the subsequent dismissals.
“I’d done the deal with Leverkusen,” Comolli says of the evening he signed Berbatov. “I met with Berba and his agent in the hotel and I had given Berba my pen to sign the contract. Just as he was putting the pen to paper, the phone rings. The agent excused himself and went out. Two minutes later he calls Berba out. For 20 minutes they were gone. I was thinking ‘this is going all wrong’. They came back in and signed. After it was done the agent told me it was Manchester United – they had tried to stop the deal.”
Making Tottenham competitive with the likes of United was Comolli’s challenge when he arrived in 2005, made all the more difficult by the fact that he was effectively “starting from scratch” in many areas.
“It was tough. The competition was massive. With a good young player in Europe, the competition is not so much from the clubs in his own country but from the English clubs. The big four are so competitive, so well organised in terms of scouting for youth players. There are only very few talented players in Europe – we can’t sign players from Africa or South America – so the competition was ferocious. We managed to put in a very competitive scouting network that allowed us to sign very good young players.
“The main legacy of my time at the club is the academy. The difference between when I arrived and when I left is massive. Speak to anyone know, even on the Continent and they will tell you that Spurs now have one of the leading academies in Europe.
“There was nothing four years ago in terms of scouting and coaching. There were scouts who were being paid and they had not been to a game for two years. It was crazy. But this youth team are outstanding. Every position, there is talent. John McDermott, the Academy manager, has done an excellent job in helping make that happen.”
That Comolli will not be at the club to witness the flourishing of the likes of John Bostock – who he persuaded to join Spurs ahead of Barcelona – is largely down to Tottenham’s turbulent summer. The acrimonious last days of Berbatov, who effectively went on strike to push through his move to United, left the more damaging impression but it was the loss of Robbie Keane that proved the more unsettling.
“It was the big blow because we thought we could cope with Berbatov going, but we didn’t expect Keane to leave. There was no way the player would stay. We lost a leader of the changing room, our vice-captain. Berbatov and Keane was probably the best partnership in the Premier League since Thierry Henry and Dennis Bergkamp. They were responsible for 60 per cent of our goals for the last two years, plus the assists. It was a massive blow.
“We were happy replacing Berbatov with Roman Pavlyuchenko but replacing Keane was much harder when we didn’t know he was going until July. We tried to do some deals but as happens in the last two or three days of the window they don’t always work out. Normally you have more time to find the solution. Those deals didn’t happen and we found ourselves in a difficult situation.”
The market doesn’t lie in the football world: if you are any good, you will not be out of work for long. Did Ramos become a bad manager in the nine months after winning the Carling Cup with Tottenham? Real Madrid evidently don’t think so. Comolli was out of work for all of one night; Saint Etienne, with whom he had worked previously, offering him the technical director’s job the morning after he had left Spurs. After just 15 days’ holiday in 3½ years, it wasn’t much of a break.
There is unfinished work at Tottenham, and it has been difficult for Comolli to let that go. He makes it clear he thoroughly enjoyed his time at Spurs and stresses that he had a great relationship with Daniel Levy, the chairman.
“I think it’s a great club,” he said. “I would like to thank the board for having given me the opportunity to work at Spurs.”
Comolli believes the club need to push for the new training ground, which would be the best in the country, or they will not be able to compete with the best. He hopes, too, that his academy continues to get the support it deserves. But overall, he hopes the team will continue their current revival.
“I think they’re going to finish in the top six. They’ve got so much talent. Look at who was on the bench against West Ham. I was talking to the chief scout of a club that finished way above Spurs the other day. He went to see Spurs v Fulham and he told me that five players from the bench for Spurs would be in their first team. This squad is so talented when it clicks it will be fine.”
Comolli's transfer track record
Hits
Dimitar Berbatov
Signed for £10.9 million in May 2006, scoring 46 goals in 102 appearances before being sold to Manchester United for £30.75 million.
Jonathan Woodgate
The England centre-back arrived in January 2008 for £7 million and scored the winning goal in the Carling Cup final against Chelsea a month later.
Darren Bent
Stuck behind Berbatov, Keane and Defoe last season, the £16.5 million signing from Charlton struggled but has shown his value since becoming first choice this season, with 12 goals and an England recall.
Misses
Kevin-Prince Boateng
The supposed future star of German football has made just 14 appearances for the club since signing for £5.4 million from Hertha Berlin.
Gilberto
A Brazil international left-back but hardly Roberto Carlos. Was substituted at half-time on his debut and has never got properly fit.
Heurelho Gomes
The Brazilian goalkeeper arrived for about £8 million in the summer with an impressive pedigree but a series of embarrassing errors have shattered his confidence. Occasional flashes of his shot-stopping cannot disguise his terror on crosses.
Sunday Telegraph - 14/12/08
When Damien Comolli was sacked as Tottenham’s sporting director at the end of October, the whoops of Eurosceptic glee were barely suppressed. The continental system of managing a football club had failed: out went Juande Ramos and Comolli, in came Harry Redknapp to sort things out in the traditional way. Results improved dramatically, so vindication surely that the system had been inherently flawed all along, another fancy foreign experiment gone wrong?
Comolli, in his first interview since leaving Spurs, offers a powerful rebuttal to the charge that his recruitment policy was flawed and argues cogently that he has given the club a robust legacy that will sustain Tottenham for years, if not decades to come. It might be painful watching from the outside but Comolli is proud to see the players he worked so hard to bring to White Hart Lane in such fine fettle.
“I’m pleased when I see Woodgate doing fantastically, Assou-Ekotto playing well; I thought Zokora was outstanding last week [against West Ham]. And Corluka, Modric, all of them. I’m very pleased. When I made mistakes I knew it quite quickly. I don’t think I made many mistakes. The players who are still there and playing, I knew they had the quality. Sorry, I don’t mean to sound arrogant by saying that, but that’s the way I felt. I’m pleased the players are doing well, but not surprised. I’m not surprised that Darren Bent has scored 12 goals this seasons. I knew he would score goals.”
The repeated fallacy about Comolli’s role was that he signed players without the manager’s agreement. Daniel Levy, the Spurs chairman, denied that emphatically last month, but Comolli struggled to shift public perception that he was responsible only for the signings that didn’t come off.
“I think it is part of the role of being sporting director. What works has nothing to do with you but what doesn’t work, you have to take the blame.
‘’Overall, in terms of trading, it worked well. As far as I’m concerned I probably made about three or four mistakes out of 25 first-team deals during my time. Some of those I consider mistakes now, could turn out to be a success in the future. You never know – that’s the beauty with players, especially young ones.
“In pure business terms, my work was very profitable for the club. There is quality in the team and there is value. For the three or four mistakes I made, I’m sure overall it is very positive for the club. You’re not in Europe three years in a row and winning a trophy unless you get the right players.” There were few deals that went more right for Tottenham than the signing of Dimitar Berbatov, a terrific coup for Comolli, so it was ironic that the machinations surrounding the Bulgarian’s summer move to Manchester United proved so instrumental in the team’s crash in form and the subsequent dismissals.
“I’d done the deal with Leverkusen,” Comolli says of the evening he signed Berbatov. “I met with Berba and his agent in the hotel and I had given Berba my pen to sign the contract. Just as he was putting the pen to paper, the phone rings. The agent excused himself and went out. Two minutes later he calls Berba out. For 20 minutes they were gone. I was thinking ‘this is going all wrong’. They came back in and signed. After it was done the agent told me it was Manchester United – they had tried to stop the deal.”
Making Tottenham competitive with the likes of United was Comolli’s challenge when he arrived in 2005, made all the more difficult by the fact that he was effectively “starting from scratch” in many areas.
“It was tough. The competition was massive. With a good young player in Europe, the competition is not so much from the clubs in his own country but from the English clubs. The big four are so competitive, so well organised in terms of scouting for youth players. There are only very few talented players in Europe – we can’t sign players from Africa or South America – so the competition was ferocious. We managed to put in a very competitive scouting network that allowed us to sign very good young players.
“The main legacy of my time at the club is the academy. The difference between when I arrived and when I left is massive. Speak to anyone know, even on the Continent and they will tell you that Spurs now have one of the leading academies in Europe.
“There was nothing four years ago in terms of scouting and coaching. There were scouts who were being paid and they had not been to a game for two years. It was crazy. But this youth team are outstanding. Every position, there is talent. John McDermott, the Academy manager, has done an excellent job in helping make that happen.”
That Comolli will not be at the club to witness the flourishing of the likes of John Bostock – who he persuaded to join Spurs ahead of Barcelona – is largely down to Tottenham’s turbulent summer. The acrimonious last days of Berbatov, who effectively went on strike to push through his move to United, left the more damaging impression but it was the loss of Robbie Keane that proved the more unsettling.
“It was the big blow because we thought we could cope with Berbatov going, but we didn’t expect Keane to leave. There was no way the player would stay. We lost a leader of the changing room, our vice-captain. Berbatov and Keane was probably the best partnership in the Premier League since Thierry Henry and Dennis Bergkamp. They were responsible for 60 per cent of our goals for the last two years, plus the assists. It was a massive blow.
“We were happy replacing Berbatov with Roman Pavlyuchenko but replacing Keane was much harder when we didn’t know he was going until July. We tried to do some deals but as happens in the last two or three days of the window they don’t always work out. Normally you have more time to find the solution. Those deals didn’t happen and we found ourselves in a difficult situation.”
The market doesn’t lie in the football world: if you are any good, you will not be out of work for long. Did Ramos become a bad manager in the nine months after winning the Carling Cup with Tottenham? Real Madrid evidently don’t think so. Comolli was out of work for all of one night; Saint Etienne, with whom he had worked previously, offering him the technical director’s job the morning after he had left Spurs. After just 15 days’ holiday in 3½ years, it wasn’t much of a break.
There is unfinished work at Tottenham, and it has been difficult for Comolli to let that go. He makes it clear he thoroughly enjoyed his time at Spurs and stresses that he had a great relationship with Daniel Levy, the chairman.
“I think it’s a great club,” he said. “I would like to thank the board for having given me the opportunity to work at Spurs.”
Comolli believes the club need to push for the new training ground, which would be the best in the country, or they will not be able to compete with the best. He hopes, too, that his academy continues to get the support it deserves. But overall, he hopes the team will continue their current revival.
“I think they’re going to finish in the top six. They’ve got so much talent. Look at who was on the bench against West Ham. I was talking to the chief scout of a club that finished way above Spurs the other day. He went to see Spurs v Fulham and he told me that five players from the bench for Spurs would be in their first team. This squad is so talented when it clicks it will be fine.”
Comolli's transfer track record
Hits
Dimitar Berbatov
Signed for £10.9 million in May 2006, scoring 46 goals in 102 appearances before being sold to Manchester United for £30.75 million.
Jonathan Woodgate
The England centre-back arrived in January 2008 for £7 million and scored the winning goal in the Carling Cup final against Chelsea a month later.
Darren Bent
Stuck behind Berbatov, Keane and Defoe last season, the £16.5 million signing from Charlton struggled but has shown his value since becoming first choice this season, with 12 goals and an England recall.
Misses
Kevin-Prince Boateng
The supposed future star of German football has made just 14 appearances for the club since signing for £5.4 million from Hertha Berlin.
Gilberto
A Brazil international left-back but hardly Roberto Carlos. Was substituted at half-time on his debut and has never got properly fit.
Heurelho Gomes
The Brazilian goalkeeper arrived for about £8 million in the summer with an impressive pedigree but a series of embarrassing errors have shattered his confidence. Occasional flashes of his shot-stopping cannot disguise his terror on crosses.
