Making money (rather than investing) & watching Leeds play rather than Spurs, what next?
Making money (rather than investing) & watching Leeds play rather than Spurs, what next?
By Don Scully
Yes, it is official… or rather, well known, that going from Champions League football to the lower rungs of European competition football you are going to lose buckets of money (millions even) and all because the Board at Tottenham Hotspur FC didn’t want to go all out and splash top cash on elite players… just like United, City and even Chelsea do, and will continue to do. Then there is Liverpool… and that is your top four sorted out for many years to come!
To give the Tottenham board credit, they would like top four Football as that is where the big bucks are (Champions league football); however, what they aren’t prepared to do is put in the same cash as the top four English clubs and that is why we will always be also-rans. If greatness can be achieved by using Academy players and cheap rejects, the board is happy as pigs in shit.
Alasdair Gold of the web magazine Football.London has revealed that the club have earned (so-far)£3.8m for reaching the Group Stages of this Micky mouse European Europa Conference League competition and have the chance to win even more lolly along the way; prize money of just over £12.7m (definitely not in the same financial league as Champions league football).
We will begin our Group G campaign with an away opener at Rennes (France) tonight (Thursday), with the Dutch side Vitesse and Slovenian side NS Mura all waiting their turn to face us in the group.
The web magazine Football.London explains that the £3.8m we have earned so far is more than any other team competing in this Micky Mouse Conference League competition, and this is due to us having the highest UEFA coefficient points in the contest. We will receive £426,065 for every group stage win and £166,000 for a draw. On top of that, we will grab even more pennies for reaching the knockout stages, with £850,00 for the quarter-finals, £1.7m for the semis and £2,5m for the final, while the winner of the competition will get an extra £1.7m. Granted, peanuts compared to what is on offer in the Champions League (£75.8m) or even the Europa competition; however, if we aren’t prepared to splash out on top elite players, it isn’t surprising that we are left with this crap.
My concerns
Will we ever get back into the top four and Champions League football? I doubt it, not while the board hold tightly onto the purse strings. To accumulate, you need to speculate, and the Tottenham board have to grasp that fact, where Football is concerned. They want Glory’s on the cheap.
Nuno and his team needs to do what he can with the team we’ve got, and that is a very tall order. We do have the financial clout of City, United and Chelsea, but don’t have the ambition of those directors that manage their clubs.
Talking about teams and fighting with what we’ve got:
Our former manager and player, Tim Sherwood, has said that he would rather buy a season ticket to watch Leeds United play than go to the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. Under the Leeds manager Marcelo Bielsa, they have played the kind of adventurous Football traditionally associated with our club. Whatever way we play, we are going one step forward, six back, which is not what we should be about. We have or had a proud history, and in the last twenty years or so, it has all crashed into a money tree for specific individuals.
So it isn’t surprising that Sherwood has admitted that he would rather watch Bielsa’s men week in and week out than watching his former club in action.
To be honest, while the board have this mentality that their priority is making money out of our new Tottenham Stadium – not investing in the team as the other big clubs do – then we will be floating around mid-table for many years to come (and maybe occasionally fighting relegation)… almost certainly until hell freezes over unless the board change tack or we get new and more ambitious owners.
Agree or disagree, it it our club!
By Don Scully.