I'm going to struggle to communicate this coherently, but I'll give it a shot.
The fundamental thing that we've witnessed at Spurs is what can be achieved when a team is coached to play better than the sum of it's parts suggest. It's not just Tottenham take the recent example of Poch's Southampton, RB Leipzig, Wolves, Sheffield Utd., Southampton (under Hasenhuttl), Ajax, Leicester (under Rodgers) and Liverpool to name but a few.
These teams play a system that becomes their biggest asset, it enables them to compete at a far higher level than their peer group and go toe to toe with those above. It isn't reliant on the individual players. Yes, the better the individual's ability within the group the better the team (provided they too are playing for the team and not for themselves).
To look at this further the individual players in this cohesive, well-coached unit look to the outside like world-beaters, because they are either on occasion betting Worldclass opposition. It's why the football world were fighting over Schiderlin, who was thought of as one of the best DM's and why Utd spunked a fortune on him and then doing it again on Luke Shaw hailed as the best LB. Why Liverpool spunked money on Lovren, Lallana. Chelsea on Bakayoko and Drinkwater, the list is endless. But no doubt there will be teams eyeing up RB Leipzig's players as they did Ajax's recently.
Our squad is good, the level of consistency we've performed at is testament to this but just like all squads the players within them play out their own peaks and troughs of personal development and decline be that via the will of mother nature, injury, mentality whatever. Team dynamics/performance are also affected positively and negatively via the movement of the players in's and out's. And also the lack of freshness of ideas, methods of the coach if the team isn't being changed.
The whole thing about "quality" of individuals, however, is moot when teams that are not noted for the makeup of said "quality" start to outplay those with recognised "quality".
We live in a polarized world so heavily focused on Ballon'dor winners, 'X' is better than 'Y' and the moment a player gets media attention they become elevated into a god-like figure (this does also in part feed the players' ego and in many cases their performance levels but I digress), with every supporter at each club obsessing over their team selling, buying or not buy player 'X' or 'Y'. But what gets lost in all this is the team's fundamentally principles, it's philosophy of playing, it's system and dynamic.
The system that is played is the king. The players within that system that give life to it are transient, mere pawns on a chessboard. It's why we can batter Chelsea 5-3 with Mason and Bentaleb in the heart of midfield, It's why we got battered yesterday with a team consisting of Barkley, Alonso and Giroud. It's why we got battered by Leipzig with a makeshift defence containing a Chelsea academy player on loan.
Yes! Players are better than others and yes when the aim should be to look to incrementally improve when replacing player 'X' or 'Y', but without a system of playing you're fucked.
We right now are fucked.
