well Spurs have done great recently. Genuinely, no doubt. That’s not what I’m saying. It is possible to do what they did. But that is not what clubs should look to do. Pooch himself threatens to leave every season because he doesn’t get any money. You still miss the point that if you want to say we did badly then compare the results over the entire period, not just cherry picking the period it works better for them because they haven’t planned and worked towards this for 15 years and it is finally paying off. That is the point.
They bought Suarez and sold him for 3 times as much, bought Coutinho and sold him for 10 times as much. We bought RvP and sold him for 8 times as much, we bought Cesc and sold him for 10 times as much without buying Benteke inbetween, we win. We were also only £1 away from signing Suarez
Ramsey you keep pretending like he hasn’t got an opinion himself in all of this, I think he does. Maybe he said two years ago yes if we get back to the CL I’ll stay, otherwise I go to one of the best teams in the world and get paid bank instead.
And how come we got better results in 2006-2015 with less spend than Spurs and Liverpool if their method is superior? Obv. because it wasn’t but it maybe is right now. Suddenly going HA now they’re above us doesn’t work when comparing methods if that wasn’t their method. Evaluate the whole process and we’re still doing better. If they’re above us for another decade then that’s a fair comparison of methods.
I mean I think I understand your general point that they’re doing better than us NOW but don’t confuse that with the method we’ve worked under for 15 years because we were superior to them evaluated over that period, bar Liverpool’s european success which they always had over us from back in the 70s.
What you miss when I say we had better teams then is that you need to get that the lack of spending then, it translates into our slow decline. That’s how it works most of the time, even though another team can pop up and do well with little money, our own decline in a bubble is down to a lack of spending over a long period of time.
If you have a CL finals team in 06 it doesn’t mean that if you stop spending then you’re trash in 08. maybe in 2010. or so. players stay for years, it takes time, effects come in slowly sometimes.
Liverpool got £200m or so for Suarez and Coutinho, that is rare and almost unprecedented in top football, an anomaly. Rare. Doesn’t happen. It is not a method or a policy, it is rare. That set them up to keep trying things.
Spurs still have won as much as my neighbour, but they look great now. Occasionally teams get it right. That doesn’t mean we’ve managed our assesses particularly poorly (although obviously on a few occasions we have but so have all of them as well so it’s not an argument when comparing the three of us).
edit: also what @InvincibleDB10 points out. Our starting point was crap, we just had a better manager than they did at the time, we were above them because we were better at a bunch of things and that the squad was better in a vacuum in say 2011 doesn’t mean our squad was better setup to go into the next 5 years in 2013. Take a look at the team we had back then, we beat Liverpool and scum continually in the league with players like Chamakh, Sanogo, Denilson, Santos, Silvestre, Almunia etc many of them often as regular starters, we were carried by a couple of individual great buys like Mozart, Cazorla, Cesc, RvP etc who all cost little to nothing by the standards at the time but were mostly gone in 2013 due to our slow decline and lack of economic support, we didn’t have a player in the squad that cost more than £15m up to 2014 when the top players were going for £50-60m between clubs (removing anomalies like RM getting Bale or Ronaldo for £80m) actually looking to improve.