The Secret Diary of a Blogger #001
Thursday 13th July
Someone shared a meme earlier. A list of summer transfers.
Lukaku - £75M to Manchester Utd
Silva - £43.5M to Manchester City
Lacazette - £45M to them lot down the road
Rudiger - £34M to Chelsea
Salah - £35.7M to Liverpool
Doris - Free
That last one on the list is the Tottenham summer signing. A little bit of ye old self-deprecation from Spurs Twitter there. No doubt to most, the list reads like a brick chucked through the (transfer) window. To me, it reads like I've walked into a cafe in Shoreditch that only provides bowls of cereal on the menu and been charged five times the amount for one serving that a box would cost in Tesco. God damn the footballing bubble and its unnerving obese like growth. There's so much money in the game that £40M is the new £20M. Actually, it sometimes feels more like the new £10M.
We've still yet to make a move ourselves, Doris aside.
I'm not going to get bogged down by financial semantics and start quoting the new stadium build claiming we can't afford to bid £40M for X player. It's that we can't afford to pay them 200k and some per week. I'm not seeking sympathy here for small little rich club Tottenham Hotspur, when say Swansea tag Siggy with an inflated price tag. Why shouldn't they when they know clubs above them can afford it? As for spending for the sake of it, we're not that club. Not anymore. No director of football and misguided not so magnificent signings. Errors, mistakes...risks. That's the nature of player acquisitions. I'm not overly keen for all the young French unknowns we sign/get linked with either. I'm lusting for players that can like for like replace (rotate, play alongside) the top ones we have right now.
Not sure what my point is.
We can't compete but we still managed to do just that. There will be expensive almost but not quite top tier signings out there that won't be picked up by the aforementioned clubs that we can invest in. The fact they won't be targeted by others means they'll be more accepting of our current wage structure. I don't even want to consider a dead quiet summer from our perspective. Need to keep it fresh, inject something new into the momentum we've created.
Although one player looks certain to be gone. Kyle Walker. I guess this one is paradoxical. It's been made clear by manager and chairman we don't sell our best players unless Pochettino approves. It's easy for me to consider this statement as a sly, diplomatic way to do just that (sell our best players) and disguise it as a transfer out we can easily live with. Maybe we can do with the £40M - £50M we'll probably get for him? It's either going to the war chest or the shoe box under Levy's bed. Maybe Poch feels the amount City are willing to pay is so much more than he's worth. The player might be homesick (which is the polite way to say he wants to earn a ridiculous amount of money) and that this syncs perfectly with the money we'll gain from his ambition to be elsewhere.
So it's a potential agreeable scenario where we'll bolster the right side and kick on from there, richer off the pitch and perhaps even richer on it. Pochettino is key here. I believe with some comfort that perhaps aside from Kane, Dele, Eriksen, Rose and perhaps two or three more players - the rest are outstanding under Poch and his guidance within this team. Elsewhere, under a different structure and a variety of egos and styles, they might suffer.
Of course, the reason it's paradoxical is, if we can rationalise Walker's sale then what's the excuse next time when it's one of those truly irreplaceable key members that want a piece of what Kyle is getting?
This is why Spurs requiring silverware to consolidate the potential for more silverware is now imperative in retaining the services of all those key players. Even though football, that bloated bubble we exist in, caters for all. We sign players cheaply, we sell them for ten times the amount and we go again, constantly churning out talent that gets snatched away. Losing those irreplaceable ones will be acceptance that our ability to challenge is permanently bottle-necked. In terms of this team we've birthed in the past two seasons, losing any of them will feel like there's cracks in the brick work. Even Walker going doesn't sit well with me because of that team unity that has existed so wonderfully since our awakening.
Footballers are professionals and they see their peers elsewhere and think 'I'm better, why am I not earning as much?'. Because of this and the clubs that benefit from acquiring them, those teams are also more likely to win things too. Win win for the players. Win win for the accountancy of our club. Win lose for us.
Same old, same old, yeah?
Anyways, here's my list to rival the one I started this entry with.
Kane - £150M - Going nowhere
Dele - £100M - Going nowhere
Rose - £50M - Going nowhere
Eriksen - £45M - Going nowhere
Lloris - £30M - Going nowhere
Alderweireld- £40M - Going nowhere
Wanyama - £40M - Going nowhere
Dier - £40M - Going nowhere
Yep, we've still get the most exciting core of players in the league. I'm alright with this.
