Dealing with the great expectations

Football fans are often called fickle – by fans of other clubs, by the media, and by one another. Spurs fans are no different. If we sign a star player, some fans get overexcited and start proclaiming that we’ll win the league (or at least a cup… or the double over Woolwich).

After Harry Kane’s breakthrough season, some fans were talking him up as the best player in the country, and expecting him to lead us to glory almost single-handedly.

That’s not fickleness – that’s fun. It’s fun to believe that your team’s going to win the league – it’s fun to believe that this is going to be their year. Personally I think we’re really lucky to support Tottenham Hotspur; not just because we are a glorious club, dripping in a rich, deep history, but also because we’ve not been spoilt by success.

In my lifetime, success has been so infrequent that I don’t expect us to win anything, and when we do, it’s that much more special. Imagine being a Manchester United fan growing up in the nineties; you would have such a skewed sense of the reality of supporting a football club. The last two seasons must have had such a crippling effect on their belief in their club and their sense of what being a support is all about. But it’s good to be brought back down to earth once in a while, even if it might not have felt that way for them.

[linequote]I think we’re really lucky to support Tottenham Hotspur; not just because we are a glorious club, dripping in a rich, deep history, but also because we’ve not been spoilt by success[/linequote]

Alongside this fickleness (or fun) is the realisation that the teams with the top 5 wage bills will generally finish in the top 5 or 6 in the Premier League – for example, the top 5 wage bills last year belonged to:

Manchester United
Manchester City
Chelsea
Woolwich
Liverpool

Clubs will occasionally punch above their weight – Blackburn in 1994/95 (complete with Jack Walker bankrolling them), Blackpool in 2010/11, Swansea since 2011 – but generally clubs finish roughly in order of their spending on transfers and wages. It’s increasingly difficult to break the mould and clubs are trying anything to do so without taking financial risks. Hence we have seen a revamp of our scouting team and methods (black box and all).

But that doesn’t dampen our enthusiasm. A season of homegrown heroes emerging – of our beloved local boy Harry Kane scoring against The Scum and The Other Scum – only rouses our boyish (or girlish) outlook on the game. Using pre-season results as ‘proof’ for why this will be our year, we turn up for opening day with the name of the new striker on our back (if we’re 10 years old) and an optimistic glow hanging over us. Or at least we should do.

Instead, so many of us turn up expectant. We demand success, we’re already furious at the board before a ball has been kicked because they haven’t filled our problem positions FOR THE NINTH YEAR RUNNING!!!! And we boo after a home draw against a pretty good side that we collected zero points against last year.

Where has this level of expectation come from? What makes us think we deserve to roll over teams like Stoke City, deserve to finish in the top 4 and deserve to have the perfect squad that other teams could only dream of?

If you take a step back and consider ‘modern day’ Spurs under the ownership of ENIC, it’s hard to argue against the idea that we’ve consistently punched above our weight. We’re the 6th UK club in the football rich list and we finished 5th last season. We’re 6th in the wage table. The team above us (Liverpool) have a wage bill 44% larger than ours (the difference will be even greater now after our summer clear-out). That’s an astonishing difference, and yet we finished above Liverpool last season.

Our league positions in the 14 years before ENIC were: 13th, 6th, 3rd, 10th, 15th, 8th, 15th, 7th, 8th, 10th, 14th, 11th, 10th, 12th. An average of 10th.

And in the14 years since ENIC: 9th, 10th, 14th, 9th, 5th, 5th, 11th, 8th, 4th, 5th, 4th, 5th, 6th, 5th. An average of 7th.

In that time we’ve seen billionaire owners take over clubs and make the top 4 almost impenetrable, and yet we’ve maintained a consistent performance.

It has become cliche to rattle these off, but we now have one of the best training centres in the world, one of the most productive academies in Europe, and a new stadium on the way.

Levy/ENIC have done some abhorrent (mostly non-football) things that I absolutely disagree with: the treatment of Martin Jol, the use of Stubhub, Thomson ticket deals, ticket price rises, the proposed move to Stratford, the proposed move to Milton Keynes. I could go on.

But can we really complain about football matters?

Can people legitimately be talking about fan protests again?

Levy and ENIC have consistently delivered us league finishes above what we could realistically have demanded, whilst all the time investing in infrastructure for the future.

We sell our best players because they want regular Champions League football and larger salaries. We sack our managers because they don’t provide the Champions League football that might keep those players. We are in limbo – not because of the way we are run, but because of the nature of the Premier League.

In the last fortnight there have been countless articles – on blogs, and in the mainstream press – detailing how the Tottenham board has failed us again by not backing Mauricio Pochettino and delivering a fully-formed squad to start the season with.

I’d like to start to address that by stating that it seems as if fans of every single club think that they have a problem position that hasn’t been filled. Manchester United have started the season with Phil Jones, Chris Smalling, Marcos Rojo and Jonny Evans as their centre-backs. To many that looked ludicrous pre-season, but Smalling has been fantastic in their opening two matches and Daley Blind has reinvented himself as a centre-back.

Last year Chelsea had no top-level back-up for Diego Costa, but he mostly stayed fit and they won the league. We need a striker and a defensive midfielder, but we could go the season without signing either and most likely be fine (i.e. still finish in the top 6 or 7). We have three strikers as it stands, two of whom are proven Premier League players.

But let’s assume that we have been ‘failed’ by our recruitment strategy; why might that be?

Firstly, we’re in a tricky position where we’re targeting players who don’t want Champions League football now, but do want Champions League football in the near future. How many strikers are there around that are suitable for a club like us, i.e. willing to accept less than Champions League, but good enough to help a team push for Champions League?

Despite these obvious challenges, Daniel Levy clearly recognises that we are far from perfect in the transfer market. This is displayed in his hiring of various specialists during his tenure: David Pleat, Frank Arnesen, Damien Comolli, Ian Broomfield, and Franco Baldini. In the last year he has recruited two of the most highly-rated recruitment experts in Paul Mitchell (Head of Recruitment) and Rob Mackenzie (Head of Player Identification).

In an ideal world, Mitchell and Mackenzie would have come up with a list of fantastic young players who are all under the radar, gettable for £5m (with no competition), and will be big hits straight away. The reality is that the pool of strikers able to improve a top 5/6 team in one of the best leagues in the world is really quite a small pool.

For every Wilfried Bony and Dimitar Berbatov there’s an Emmanuel Rivière or Roberto Soldado. I imagine we’ve started off enquiring for strikers that aren’t attainable and have moved down the list as the window as progressed, ending with Saido Berahino and possibly even with Charlie Austin (ugh). If we can’t get the players that we want, we move on to the next on the list, but time has passed. And if we can’t get that one? We move on to the next, but more time has passed still.

Fans ask why we didn’t sign Berahino in the first week of the transfer window for £25m. Assuming that he was at the top of our list (and let’s face it, that seems unlikely) there are two practical issues there.

1. West Bromwich Albion will drag their heels – just like we did with Gareth Bale – in the hope that we get fed up and look elsewhere.
2. They want £25m, which is arguably about £5m-10m too much.

If it was just a case of stumping up another £1m or so to get a deal done, do you not think Levy would do it? I absolutely do. It’s clearly not that simple – so do we just take a £10m hit and pay £25m?

There are reasons why that would be a bad idea. Firstly, because the next time we go to negotiate a deal, the team we’re negotiating with will know that we’re willing to pay over the odds just to get a deal done. We don’t have the endless funds of Manchester City or Chelsea and so we can’t operate like that. And secondly, because we have a stadium to finance, and so all funds must be used carefully.

[linequote]I understand that expectations weigh heavy. Perhaps Levy needs to manage those better, because a lot of people’s seem to be unreasonable[/linequote]

Teams are reluctant to sell. They try to hold onto players (as we have in the past) and that drives prices up. If they know a player wants out then they need to find a replacement. It all takes significant time.

So what is the impact of not getting deals done? Tom Collomosse – a writer I respect – wrote yesterday:

‘Between 2010-11 and 2012-13, Spurs won just one of their seven League games in August as first Harry Redknapp and then Andre Villas-Boas worked with squads still under construction. In two of those three seasons, they finished only one point outside the Champions League places.’

Further digging into statistics showed that the effect of not signing players early might not be so significant. Dazzazzad, a poster on COYS worked out that the points per game tallies with the seasons as whole:

‘Looking at the first 5 games from the last 5 seasons brought up 44 points for an average of 1.76 points per game. Looking at the full season points totals of the last 5 seasons we average – guess what? – 1.76 points per game.’

It is ludicrous that the transfer window is still open with the season having started. It is unfortunate that we have not completed our business. It is a shame for Mauricio Pochettino that he has not had a full pre-season with a full squad. But it is totally understandable within context.

In my idealistic bubble, I long for a world where Spurs fans skip to the stadium on opening day singing songs about Harry Kane, winning the league (“and now you’re gonna believe us”) and not worrying about what we don’t have, but thinking about what we do have.

I understand that expectations weigh heavy. Perhaps Levy needs to manage those better, because a lot of people’s seem to be unreasonable.

Are our fans fickle? You decide.