Cybereagles

Its a Goal wrote:Malcom, will he be a good fit?

It is a risk. He will be competing against Lamela, Son, Lucas and Alli. Is it me or are we short of wing forwards? Dele Alli isnt even a wing forward but I have put him there.

Confirmed

Departure - Connor Oglivie (23 yo) to Gillingham
Arrival - Isak Solberg (15 yo) from Bryne, Norway

Likely Rumours

Departure - Trippier (28 yo) to Napoli
Arrival - Clarke (18 yo) from Leeds
Departure - Joshua Oluwayemi (15/16/17 yo) to Southampton - Refusing to sign an Academy contract with club

Unlikely / Rumour

Arrival - Ndombele, Bale, Tielemans, Sessegnon, Zaniolo, Grealish, Asensio, Wan Bissaka, Zaha, Aarons
Departure - Albert Rachi

Cristao II wrote:Confirmed

Departure - Connor Oglivie (23 yo) to Gillingham
Arrival - Isak Solberg (15 yo) from Bryne, Norway

Likely Rumours

Departure - Trippier (28 yo) to Napoli
Arrival - Clarke (18 yo) from Leeds
Departure - Joshua Oluwayemi (15/16/17 yo) to Southampton - Refusing to sign an Academy contract with club

Unlikely / Rumour

Arrival - Ndombele, Bale, Tielemans, Sessegnon, Zaniolo, Grealish, Asensio, Wan Bissaka, Zaha, Aarons
Departure - Albert Rachi

I avoid rumours. Just bloggers and columnists looking for traffic.

My favorite wasn't included. It is Moura's 3rd goal against Ajax.

Daniel Levy: is he Tottenham Hotspur’s star man? May 26 2019, 12:01am, CHAMPIONS LEAGUE | JONATHAN NORTHCROFT

Look beyond pitch and dugout — the man who made Spurs a force is in the boardroom

A few days before the first Christmas of the millennium, Daniel Levy bought control of Spurs. Not everybody reacted with festive cheer. Cornelius Sierhuis, chairman of AEK Athens, warned: “I hate to say this, but the deal does not bode well for Tottenham.” The Daily Mirror carried his quotes in a story headlined: “Wreckers! AEK Athens boss warns: ENIC will ruin Tottenham.”

Fast forward 18-and-a-half years. If you were setting up a football club from scratch and could pluck one person from the Tottenham Hotspur stadium, the smart choice would not be Harry Kane, Christian Eriksen or even Mauricio Pochettino. It would be Levy, the biggest star of Tottenham’s journey from a club so comic it coined its own word for fecklessness (“spursy”) to Champions League finalists and envy of every rational football investor. As the Crystal Palace chairman Steve Parish wrote in these pages, under Levy and his backer Joe Lewis, Tottenham have been transformed to a club with “the smartest transfer policy in football, the best youth system, probably the best training ground and now the world’s best stadium”.

ENIC originally stood for English National Investment Company. In fairness to Sierhuis back in December 2000, when ENIC bought 29.9% of Spurs from Alan Sugar for £22m, it was reasonable to have doubts. Lewis, a billionaire currency speculator domiciled tax-free in the Bahamas, was no football nut. He founded ENIC initially to buy into textiles. Levy was the thirtysomething Cambridge economist and family friend whose dad founded the budget menswear store, Mister Byrite, and whose own background was in clothes retail. Levy was bought in to run ENIC in the UK and quickly made Lewis £144m by making a brilliant investment in an internet start-up, but his acumen for the football business seemed flawed — initially.

Using Lewis’ funding, he acquired stakes in six clubs around Europe — Rangers, AEK, Vicenza, Slavia Prague, FC Basel and Spurs. Take Rangers: Levy paid £18.9m for 20% and injected a further £21m but found his ideas for moulding the then Scottish champions mostly ignored. His holding gave him no control and the stories in Scottish media circles — whether exaggerated or not — were of him making earnest pitches to the Rangers board only for the majority stakeholder, David Murray, and his circle to dismiss them. Rangers spent and spent but dipped on the pitch, and when Levy sold his stake back to Murray in 2004 it was for just £8.7m.

Vicenza had just won the Coppa Italia when ENIC bought in but were toiling in Serie B by the time it sold up. Slavia went into debt. AEK won three successive titles before ENIC but just one trophy, the Greek Cup, in four years after its arrival, and ENIC’s exit was acrimonious. Sierhuis’ complaint was, “ENIC’s investments in clubs have largely failed because of an inability or unwillingness to fund in accordance with its stakes.”

Seen from 2019, though, things look different. Levy was ahead of his time. The vision of building an international family of clubs has been adopted by Manchester City, Red Bull and the Pozzo family who own Watford. Levy was right, too, about the need to move away from the old “benefactor model” of club ownership. Unless you have sovereign or oligarch wealth, or a golden brand such as Real Madrid or Manchester United, structured, strategic and careful spending is the only sustainable way to navigate the inflationary riptides of modern football.

It is also clear, now, that Levy spent those early years investing in the game with open eyes and ears, learning lessons he would subsequently implement. Football acumen? How’s this: while ENIC’s buyout was going through Spurs were finalising the £180,000 purchase of an East Fife striker, Stevie Ferguson, who never played for them. The first post-Levy recruit was somewhat better — Teddy Sheringham on a free — and transfers have gone on from there. The overall net spend on players in Levy’s 18-plus years of stewardship is around £240m and over the past 10 seasons it stands at a sensational £15m. In 2016-17 he raised £45m from selling squad offcuts Ryan Mason, Nacer Chadli, Alex Pritchard and Tom Carroll; in 2017-18 £43m from Kevin Wimmer, Nabil Bentaleb, Clinton N’Jie and Federico Fazio. Sir Alex Ferguson, after being taken right down to the final hours of deadline day and made to fork out £30.75m for Dimitar Berbatov, commented that negotiating with Levy “was more painful than my hip operation”.

On the other side of the table Levy can be cold. The Club by Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg contains the story of Levy antagonising smaller clubs at a Premier League meeting when he pitched to get the Big Six a greater share of TV revenue. Levy announced: “We only want what’s fair,” and repeated those five words to every objection raised.

But read Pochettino’s memoir, Brave New World, and a different chairman emerges. To Poch he is always “Daniel”. There are tales of wine-tasting mini-breaks together, dressed-down work retreats at Levy’s home in the French Alps and a bonding trip to Argentina for chairman and coaching staff with quad-biking, horse-riding, paintballing and a river trip. The boat capsized and Pochettino pulled Levy to safety. “The chairman’s wife says I’m the third member of their marriage,” Pochettino writes.

It would have been impossible for Levy to build Tottenham without there being soul and warmth at the heart of the project. He is a Spurs supporter who was always working towards owning the club when ENIC began in football. He forged personal connections with managers. One of them, Martin Jol, said in 2007 that it was tough getting his way on transfers, but Levy had a far-reaching strategy, to one day have a new stadium, be a Champions League club and for Spurs to be worth half a billion pounds. It was unlikely then but has all been realised now except the valuation. Forbes valued Tottenham at $1.237bn last summer — and the club will be worth a lot more now.

Pochettino’s bond with Levy has been important in keeping him at the club and is one of Spurs’ main hopes for retaining him further. He needs personal connection. With extraordinary candour last week he said, “Football is a context of emotion and emotional state. The emotional level you arrive at [for the final] is going to be decisive and you’re going to have the capacity to win or lose. It’s not tactics, it’s not physical. It’s about how the emotion triggers your talent and quality.” That he cried in Amsterdam when Spurs reached the final was nothing unexpected. “My mother said to me you are a llorona, a person who cries often and a lot. I am strong but I cry. Maybe I take my car to my house, 20 minutes to Barnet, and listen to some music and it translates to some moment in my life. I start [to cry] and when I arrive home my wife says ‘what happened?!’”

Should Spurs win in Madrid Pochettino says he will “cry one week.”. Don’t be surprised if Levy also sheds a tear.

Cristao II wrote:Daniel Levy: is he Tottenham Hotspur’s star man? May 26 2019, 12:01am, CHAMPIONS LEAGUE | JONATHAN NORTHCROFT

Look beyond pitch and dugout — the man who made Spurs a force is in the boardroom

A few days before the first Christmas of the millennium, Daniel Levy bought control of Spurs. Not everybody reacted with festive cheer. Cornelius Sierhuis, chairman of AEK Athens, warned: “I hate to say this, but the deal does not bode well for Tottenham.” The Daily Mirror carried his quotes in a story headlined: “Wreckers! AEK Athens boss warns: ENIC will ruin Tottenham.”

Fast forward 18-and-a-half years. If you were setting up a football club from scratch and could pluck one person from the Tottenham Hotspur stadium, the smart choice would not be Harry Kane, Christian Eriksen or even Mauricio Pochettino. It would be Levy, the biggest star of Tottenham’s journey from a club so comic it coined its own word for fecklessness (“spursy”) to Champions League finalists and envy of every rational football investor. As the Crystal Palace chairman Steve Parish wrote in these pages, under Levy and his backer Joe Lewis, Tottenham have been transformed to a club with “the smartest transfer policy in football, the best youth system, probably the best training ground and now the world’s best stadium”.

ENIC originally stood for English National Investment Company. In fairness to Sierhuis back in December 2000, when ENIC bought 29.9% of Spurs from Alan Sugar for £22m, it was reasonable to have doubts. Lewis, a billionaire currency speculator domiciled tax-free in the Bahamas, was no football nut. He founded ENIC initially to buy into textiles. Levy was the thirtysomething Cambridge economist and family friend whose dad founded the budget menswear store, Mister Byrite, and whose own background was in clothes retail. Levy was bought in to run ENIC in the UK and quickly made Lewis £144m by making a brilliant investment in an internet start-up, but his acumen for the football business seemed flawed — initially.

Using Lewis’ funding, he acquired stakes in six clubs around Europe — Rangers, AEK, Vicenza, Slavia Prague, FC Basel and Spurs. Take Rangers: Levy paid £18.9m for 20% and injected a further £21m but found his ideas for moulding the then Scottish champions mostly ignored. His holding gave him no control and the stories in Scottish media circles — whether exaggerated or not — were of him making earnest pitches to the Rangers board only for the majority stakeholder, David Murray, and his circle to dismiss them. Rangers spent and spent but dipped on the pitch, and when Levy sold his stake back to Murray in 2004 it was for just £8.7m.

Vicenza had just won the Coppa Italia when ENIC bought in but were toiling in Serie B by the time it sold up. Slavia went into debt. AEK won three successive titles before ENIC but just one trophy, the Greek Cup, in four years after its arrival, and ENIC’s exit was acrimonious. Sierhuis’ complaint was, “ENIC’s investments in clubs have largely failed because of an inability or unwillingness to fund in accordance with its stakes.”

Seen from 2019, though, things look different. Levy was ahead of his time. The vision of building an international family of clubs has been adopted by Manchester City, Red Bull and the Pozzo family who own Watford. Levy was right, too, about the need to move away from the old “benefactor model” of club ownership. Unless you have sovereign or oligarch wealth, or a golden brand such as Real Madrid or Manchester United, structured, strategic and careful spending is the only sustainable way to navigate the inflationary riptides of modern football.

It is also clear, now, that Levy spent those early years investing in the game with open eyes and ears, learning lessons he would subsequently implement. Football acumen? How’s this: while ENIC’s buyout was going through Spurs were finalising the £180,000 purchase of an East Fife striker, Stevie Ferguson, who never played for them. The first post-Levy recruit was somewhat better — Teddy Sheringham on a free — and transfers have gone on from there. The overall net spend on players in Levy’s 18-plus years of stewardship is around £240m and over the past 10 seasons it stands at a sensational £15m. In 2016-17 he raised £45m from selling squad offcuts Ryan Mason, Nacer Chadli, Alex Pritchard and Tom Carroll; in 2017-18 £43m from Kevin Wimmer, Nabil Bentaleb, Clinton N’Jie and Federico Fazio. Sir Alex Ferguson, after being taken right down to the final hours of deadline day and made to fork out £30.75m for Dimitar Berbatov, commented that negotiating with Levy “was more painful than my hip operation”.

On the other side of the table Levy can be cold. The Club by Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg contains the story of Levy antagonising smaller clubs at a Premier League meeting when he pitched to get the Big Six a greater share of TV revenue. Levy announced: “We only want what’s fair,” and repeated those five words to every objection raised.

But read Pochettino’s memoir, Brave New World, and a different chairman emerges. To Poch he is always “Daniel”. There are tales of wine-tasting mini-breaks together, dressed-down work retreats at Levy’s home in the French Alps and a bonding trip to Argentina for chairman and coaching staff with quad-biking, horse-riding, paintballing and a river trip. The boat capsized and Pochettino pulled Levy to safety. “The chairman’s wife says I’m the third member of their marriage,” Pochettino writes.

It would have been impossible for Levy to build Tottenham without there being soul and warmth at the heart of the project. He is a Spurs supporter who was always working towards owning the club when ENIC began in football. He forged personal connections with managers. One of them, Martin Jol, said in 2007 that it was tough getting his way on transfers, but Levy had a far-reaching strategy, to one day have a new stadium, be a Champions League club and for Spurs to be worth half a billion pounds. It was unlikely then but has all been realised now except the valuation. Forbes valued Tottenham at $1.237bn last summer — and the club will be worth a lot more now.

Pochettino’s bond with Levy has been important in keeping him at the club and is one of Spurs’ main hopes for retaining him further. He needs personal connection. With extraordinary candour last week he said, “Football is a context of emotion and emotional state. The emotional level you arrive at [for the final] is going to be decisive and you’re going to have the capacity to win or lose. It’s not tactics, it’s not physical. It’s about how the emotion triggers your talent and quality.” That he cried in Amsterdam when Spurs reached the final was nothing unexpected. “My mother said to me you are a llorona, a person who cries often and a lot. I am strong but I cry. Maybe I take my car to my house, 20 minutes to Barnet, and listen to some music and it translates to some moment in my life. I start [to cry] and when I arrive home my wife says ‘what happened?!’”

Should Spurs win in Madrid Pochettino says he will “cry one week.”. Don’t be surprised if Levy also sheds a tear.

For Spurs faithful, we know the direction the club was heading. It's been insult after insult because the club was seen to fail on the pitch. The frugal nature and book balancing way the club is being run was contrary to a club that wants to be successful.
But we knew it would have to be a step by step, brick by brick approach.
For a club that has not won a trophy since 2008, only played in the CL about 4 times, we now have arguably the best training facility in the EPL and one of the best stadium in the world
We are now playing the the CL final after 4 attempts.
To only have a net spend of 15m since 2010 is phenomenal.
The stadium was built to improve our financial position to be able to compete.
Apart from trophies, infrastructure wise, Man City, Chelsea and Man United, with all their money are no better than us.
With the current trajectory that has changed the club in the last 18 year, brick by brick I can only imagine the next 18. COYS

^Lol. My brother Pajimoh calm down and slow your roll. Still a long way to go notwithstanding reaching your first CL final.

green4life wrote:^Lol. My brother Pajimoh calm down and slow your roll. Still a long way to go notwithstanding reaching your first CL final.

Bro, reaching the final is an added bonus but not the crust of my point.
The plan is to be
1. Competitive on the pitch without breaking the bank to sign or pay players.
2. Build infrasture at training level to attract and train young talents
3. Build a multi purpose Sports Entertainment Destination to generate revenue that will help recruit the best.
4. Become a European Elite club as a result of the potential financial muscle.

The last is the next brick by brick... It won't happen overnight. The stadium still has to be paid for but the tools are in place and the CL final is the result of being competitive with whatever we have.

Keep sleeping on Spurs.

C II, thanks for posting that article. It is a great insight into the way Levy has managed to justify the actions taken. It was a bossy move on his part especially when you see that nobody else was going in that direction and there is precedence to follow on how to achieve that success. I just hope this last leg of the project will yield the same result as the first 2. No doubt Levy has carved his name in the stone of Tottenham HotSpur. Forever.

Why is Nike treating us like dummies? How different is this from the 2017/2018 jersey? I might as well add dark blue cloth to the sleeves to that make it current.

pajimoh wrote:

green4life wrote:^Lol. My brother Pajimoh calm down and slow your roll. Still a long way to go notwithstanding reaching your first CL final.

Bro, reaching the final is an added bonus but not the crust of my point.
The plan is to be
1. Competitive on the pitch without breaking the bank to sign or pay players.
2. Build infrasture at training level to attract and train young talents
3. Build a multi purpose Sports Entertainment Destination to generate revenue that will help recruit the best.
4. Become a European Elite club as a result of the potential financial muscle.

The last is the next brick by brick... It won't happen overnight. The stadium still has to be paid for but the tools are in place and the CL final is the result of being competitive with whatever we have.

Keep sleeping on Spurs.

I’m not sleeping on spurs. CL is a commendable achievement but keep in mind that sleeping dogs won’t always sleep. Your competitors have funds and mostly have a strong/ thriving academy as well as recent history of successful campaigns in the league and/ or cups. That said, hard work usually pays off so I wish you good luck in the finals.

I have ordered the green jersey from this just concluded season. It is being added to my collection for the memories of victory over Ajax and Man City

[color=brown]Cristao II[/color] wrote: I have ordered the green jersey from this just concluded season. It is being added to my collection for the memories of victory over Ajax and Man City

I bought the green and home version a few weeks but my tummy is not doing it justice . This is the first time I'll have all 3 kits of a season.

Rumored second kit. I'll wait and see what the 3rd kit looks like before deciding which one I'm gonna get.

This 20 year union with Nike will be a hard one. Their kits are always dull.

[color=brown]pajimoh[/color] wrote: This 20 year union with Nike will be a hard one. Their kits are always dull.

If only UM were willing to match Nike's offer. I liked their kits better.

green4life wrote:^Lol. My brother Pajimoh calm down and slow your roll. Still a long way to go notwithstanding reaching your first CL final.

Oga G4L,Spurs have done a wonderful job,reaching CL final is no joke after not spending a dime in last two transfer.They are about to win the CL if it goes their way.
I have to give it to them,playing almost all season away from home,knockj Dortmund make them look like kids,beat City and Ajax,remember this are teams that were to beat them according to book makers.Liverpool also have done a fantastic job,this experience will only make spurs grow,they are the best team in London now .If they keep most of their players and add few,they will be in the title race as one of the fav.