- Mar 7, 2005
- 9,018
- 6,900
- Thread starter
- #141
agree to disagree on degree of investment in players, particularly this past summer when Poch needed the support. Benny is another example of over-pricing an outgoing. Clear before no-one's gonna pay 2 or 3 mill, so give him away for free to save on wages, or even sub his wages just to get rid. Gomes was the same. I don't think we over paid for anyone with the Bale money, we just paid what it took to do the deals.
Where I do agree with you is that the turnover of players is way too high. We should look to add two at the most each season, but they have to be for the first team/a clear upgrade on what we already have. Not Fazios and Stamboulis, but MM and Alex Song instead. We can afford the 30 mill, minus whatever we raise from sales, based on the tv money. Unless the money's going on the stadium instead? Rhetorical question, I've already read your answer.
Where we can debate is whether this or that player was value for money. In terms of the over all picture however we're performing above expectations for a club with a 36k capacity stadium, this is because the vast majority of a standard PL club's income comes from TV money and that's pretty flat - not much difference between top and bottom - after that it's gate receipts and with a small stadium that's hard to increase, after that it's commercial, and here we wipe the floor with the Villas and Evertons of this world, and there's no reason for us to do so given we all piggyback the international exposure of the PL, rather than Spurs having an intrinsic international cache. Finally it's about player trading and keeping wages low relative to the quality of your squad. To judge how good you are at player trading you have to pay close attention to the gross as well as the net - if you can spend a lot but keep the net low it means earlier investments have been successful, if you have the same net, but your gross is also low it means the opposite ( which is part of the reason why net alone is a rubbish benchmark).
Until recently all of this has been in balance and we've over performed relative to the PL's equivalent clubs, reflected in the fact that we've regularly finished above clubs with much bigger budgets and rarely finished below those with more equivalent budgets. Where you have a point is the last two seasons where our income has risen but our spend hasn't, we'll see the effect in our next set of accounts, but I expect to see a big profit. The club then has a decision: use most of it on players, or put it towards the new stadium. At that time they'll also announce which it is. My guess is that it will be the stadium, but I also think the splash the announcement will make will be the catalyst for our sale, and thus in the end the profit will get used on players and the stadium will get built with outside money whilst the cash pile will mean we can keep buying players without triggering FFP rules.