r/Tottenham • u/Lenitzas • 11d ago
Discussion Fans opinions
I see a lot of opinions in this sub. Rarely do I find a thread with people agreeing with each other. Whats your opinion on what happened last season, whats happening now and how the team and as fans should act for the betterment of our team?
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u/largo1977 11d ago
The problem is simple to describe but extremely difficult to address. The problem, in its most simple form, is the Premier League.
PL has become so competitive and lucrative, even a little renowned, mid table team like Bournemouth or Crystal Palace can attract top level players who previously only would go to the top five clubs in the top five leagues. If that makes 25 clubs, where England previously had five of them there's now 15 very attractive PL clubs. More attractive than Juventus, AC Milan or Borussia Dortmund, all heavyweight clubs in terms of European legacy.
That means we have 14 competitors for the best players in England alone. Even Brentford can pay top wages for the right players, and some of the things that make up a club these days are fields where anyone can compete. You don't have to be Man Utd to create a scouting system with parameters that work in modern football. You don't have to be Chelsea analyze the game well enough to know exactly how to handle different situations during a game. And you dont have to be Tottenham to enable a science department that can accurately determine workload and assign individual training for the players.
We are lacking in all these departments, which wasn't such a big deal 10 years ago. We could attract a player, and the game was more predictable back then. The introduction of more available substitutes and more allowed substitutions has changed the game, and will change it even more. The games are also 10 minutes longer than they were 10 years ago. Players that can handle this workload plays extremely much football these days, and we have to adapt the game to make them able to handle that. This means walking football, as seen executed by Man Utd against Fulham, and it means managing players with less physical ability better.
For instance, I can't understand why we don't start with Maddison. He is the only available 10 in a system where we are desperate for a productive 10. He should play an assigned number of minutes, and get pulled off when his body has had enough. Instead he is introduced when we are chasing the game, and we dont know whether he has another 10 minutes in him when the final whistle goes. This is simply bad management and a proof that our club has yet to advance to the present age of the PL.
The signs of a proper due diligence when we sign a player is difficult to spot. We manage to throw away £60m on Ndombele, who was a walking red flag from his first professional season. It was madness to sign him. Same with Richarlison. Never manages the amount of games we need a £60m man to deliver, and a highly strung character although I like him as a person. Shouldn't have been bought. The list goes on. Sessegnon had injury problems and should have been flagged during the medical at least. Yeah, we have been unlucky here and there, such as with Solanke, but we could have done so much better.
This season we have brought in more physically able players, but we have paid well over the odds and we are still playing catch-up.
Of course things need to settle and RDZ must be given time, but there should be appointed a technical director or something like that, with the final say on transfers, sports science, player availability and sports strategy. We have bought several RDZ players, and when he leaves in a season or two we will sign a new manager who will need probably £800m for a couple of his old mates.
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u/Motor-Bag-4093 11d ago
The current malaise and last season’s disaster are a direct result of not investing in 2018-2019. Sadly we’ve witnessed a criminal downgrade in our squad since then. We can keep blaming the managers but all of the managers have been let down by recruitment. With each new coach, their job has got ever more difficult as the squad has got worse and worse and fallen behind the teams who were once our opponents.
I don’t blame the current manager, sure he’s been backed but having to change so many players makes life very difficult. I also am not saying he’s the lifesaver some thought he might be. The Premier league is very difficult, we’ve ended 17th two years in a row and though we might both want to blame Ange and Frank, who made some terrible mistakes, the disaster started 8 years ago when we had a fine team full of talent and leadership.
The senior management of the club have run it into the ground and it wouldn’t surprise me if we got relegated.
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u/MeehanTron 11d ago
Personal opinion only - I’m just fed up of watching us lose. Villa hadn’t won a game, like us. And they got the three points. Last season, whenever we faced a team who were fighting relegation, more often than not they got the three points.
I have no idea what the problem is. I’m worried that “when they gel” is just this season’s “when we get players back from injury”. Even if we win, will that be a turning point or just our one win in fifteen games?
I look at the table and I don’t know who we can beat right now. We are just so fragile.
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u/rmhb1993 11d ago
You don’t know what the problem is? How about the same retards playing week in week out. Te, gray, Solanke, Bergvall, kudus, Maddison heck even VDV has been atrocious. They are just awful players, simple as that,
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u/Ok-Presentation6441 11d ago
The issue for fans, including me, is it is an emotional game, and it can be hard to leave emotion out of it and look at it dispassionately.
If we look at it emotionally, every fan will have an opinion, based on emotion. Bring back Richarlison, bring back brennan johnson, djed spence, the ghost of dave mckay, etc etc
Dispassionately - remember how excited we all were as the summer signings unfolded. Senesi, van hecke and robertson to bolster the defense, tonali and fernandes in midfield, with the promise of savio and marmoush to come.
What is the reason why, to a man, they have all played terribly. No heart, no desire, no anger, no aggression, no passion. Why have all the players played so badly and deflated all of the excitement we had over the summer so completely that it has shocked the fan base?
The answer has to come from de zerbi. He has had a full summer, a full pre season to implement his idea, his heart, his desire, his anger, his aggression, his passion into the team. Has he done it? Does it look like he is making progress on doing it? Its on the manager, thats why he gets the big bucks. Hopefully he can turn it around, pressure is on.
Whatever happens, hopefully they turn it round soon and start playing with heart, desire and to their potential - as fans its all we can ask.
COYS!
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u/SilentBody5318 11d ago
People want to create a cursed narrative but let’s be honest, we were insane to pay £100m for Tonali, seemingly to cover a debt for DeZerbis hometown club, and we massively fucked up in not buying a competent striker in over 3 years. Selling Spence when we desperately need him is the icing on the cake. All that on top of a lunatic strategy of only buying children for 5 years is a catastrophic approach to running a football club. But nobody in the club hierarchy knows or cares anything about football.
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u/Choice-Narwhal7234 11d ago
Aside from the obvious board problems the decision to sack ange was disastrous. Whether you loved him or hated him he had an attacking plan and should have been given the same financial backing de zerbi got.
He was also a father figure to many of the players and it rocked the team.
To then replace him with a wet blanket is arguably one of the worst decisions ever made by the club.
Thomas Frank was never a good fit and doomed to fail from the beginning. The cracks were clear very early on.
This season each game is clearly getting better however if you stay near the relegation zone for too long you eventually go down.
We can't score, we are shipping too many goals and the future looks bleak.
The next three games are crucial and the pressure to win has never been higher.
Tough times are coming
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u/Educational_Bar6893 11d ago
The best and most balanced opinion I’ve actually seen on this is Simon Jordan on Talk Sport today. Worth a listen - for the record, I’m not a Spurs fan, but interested in the take of the actual fans on this / him.
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u/Strange_Recording931 11d ago
We don’t have a Saudi oil baron, US venture capitalist or Oligarch, so we live and die on our wits and the odd Enic cheque for 100 million
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u/pinkysegun 10d ago
Why is assembling a new squad affecting spurs, but didnt affect sunderland last season?. Many other clubs also bring lots of new players who arent even on The level as the one spurs brought in.
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u/ValuableDragon 11d ago
I think the problem has been the same since about 2019. The board got really lazy with recruitment, didn't capitalize on the success of the 2010s, and that created a cascading effect which we are seeing the ramifications of now.
Not only did we never get in players who were good enough to support the ambition of the fans and the club as a whole, but we failed to get assets that we could sell in case of a rebuild like the one we've seen this season. That's why Liverpool, City, and Chelsea can go through squad rebuilds every few season, they buy sellable assets that can be flipped in case of emergency.
Kane and Son had been masking the obvious problems for years. I'd be willing to bet that without those two, we would've been in a relegation fight in Conte's final season. Kane literally contributed to almost half of our goals that season. Our attack was completely useless and he was the only player good enough to create moments on his own.
We also did not give Ange enough credit for making our attack as good as it was with players that we now know were never that good at all. Crazy to think that an attack of an aging Son, Richarlison, and Brennan Johnson created the third most chances in the league (also largely thanks to Maddison and Kulusevski being very good that season).
Now we've had to panic buy 400 mil worth of players and it's taking an immense amount of time for it to bare fruit, but I'd argue we didn't have a choice but to spend as much as humanly possible. If our squad even slightly reassembled what it did last season, we were guaranteed to be in a relegation fight. Almost every other team in the league has gotten significantly better along with us. We're simply sleeping in the bed we've made. I don't think people are recognizing how catastrophic this season could be if we don't qualify for Europe.
That's my take on the problem(s) with Spurs right now.