CityVP Manjit

5 years ago · 3 min. reading time · ~10 ·

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Be Careful What You Wish For

Be Careful What You Wish For

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With Liverpool more focused on their Champions League Final match, they let slip a couple of poor results that allowed Tottenham to nudge past them in the Premier League.  Tottenham's 3rd place finish did not guarantee being drawn in Pot 2, unless Liverpool went on to lose the Champions League final.  Yesterday that is what they did.

So Tottenham find themselves in a more favourable draw for next years Champions League.  Yet two years ago they received a very favourable draw and could not get out of the group stages.  Last year they were in the feared Pot 3 group and ended up with Real Madrid and Borussia Dortmund in their group.  Fortunately for them, both European football powerhouses were having indifferent seasons at that point, so Tottenham were the beneficiary of poor performances, otherwise how does one explain Real Madrid winning the Champions League, but drawing and losing to Tottenham in the group stages.  Spurs did get out of a group after being placed in Pot 3 last year.

While Inter Milan will be in Pot 4, it is more than likely that Spurs will avoid them or at least there is only a 1 in 8 chance of Inter being drawn into Tottenham's group.  The loss yesterday could be compounded for Liverpool if Benefica and Basle qualify to the Champions League group stage.  Then Liverpool will definitely be in Pot 3 and then Liverpool do have the potential nightmare group of death potential e.g. Bayern Munich, Borussia Dortmund, Liverpool, Inter Milan as an example.

When Spurs were drawn into a partial group of death draw, they did raise their game to get results against the "Big Boys" but they also need to remind themselves that both powerhouses from Spain and Germany were going through a transition. Even if Spurs had beaten Juventus and then Real Madrid again in the Semi-Final, it would have meant playing Liverpool in the Champions League final in an all-British final.  That is a final Spurs would have probably lost, just as they avoided getting to the FA Cup Final, where Chelsea would still have lifted the FA Cup.

Recognizing how Tottenham approach games, a Pot 4 team Spurs should not want is Ludogorets Razgrad.  This small Bulgarian based club can on their day topple giants.  While on paper it looks like an easy Pot 4, Tottenham never make the simpler option easy.  The last day antics against Leicester City saw a 5-4 win for Spurs, but at one point they were losing 3-1 and heading for a Pot 3 draw based on 4th place rather than actual 3rd place League position.

Pochettino has secured a new five year contract and Spurs will return to North London to occupy a brand new spanking stadium build. It is Tottenham's wage freeze structure that is worrisome.  That prevents the likes of Gareth Bale from rejoining the club, but even a club as rich as Manchester United is probably will not meet Bale's huge wage demands. 

Spurs Chairman Daniel Levy was recently revealed to be paying himself more than the ceiling for the players wages,  and Spurs boss Pochettino has hinted that if Levy cannot match his ambitions, that the "project' could be taken by another Tottenham manager.

Levy is also hamstrung with rising stadium build costs - a project that should have cost $400,000 has escalated during construction to cost over $850,000 and could even topple $1 billion dollars by the time the new stadium is open for business in the fall.  Yet Arsene Wenger, the former Arsenal boss and managerial legend, knows how hamstrung a manager can be when their club has to absorb stadium costs.

The Champions League final won by Real Madrid yesterday did feature two former Tottenham players including Modric, yet it is Bale who stole the show with a wonder overhead kick strike and by the time the ball nestled in the net, one could know the fates where conspiring against Liverpool and handing Real Madrid their 13th European Championship title and their 3rd Champions League finals victory in a row. 

Dressed in the same all-white European colours Spurs tend to wear on European match nights, one can still look at Real Madrid as Tottenham A rather than the Tottenham B squad.  So many Spurs players have originated from Ajax Amsterdam that Ajax can viewed as the Tottenham B squad.  The pecking order of Football elite should include Tottenham under the title of "Big Boys" but in reality it is the clubs willingness to spend big despite the stadium cost escalation. 

In conclusion, Tottenham at this point can congratulate Real Madrid for making their Champions League feasibly easier, though the reality of European football is, that there are no easy games, unless your team has goallkeepers like the one's Liverpool have, whose mistakes hand the other team the victory with clangers that one would not want to see at a schoolboy football match.  Karius received death threats after the match, but it is unfortunate that mistakes can be so huge.  Karius was brought because Simon Mignolet was thoroughly maligned for his mistakes as a Liverpool keeper, but nothing that Mignolet messed up in the past is comparable to the unbelievable howlers Karius made.  Yet the two howlers that Karius has made has opened the door for Tottenham to have an easier Champions League group, but just as Liverpool fans were glad to see Karius replacing Mignolet in goal, always be careful what you wish for !


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Comments

CityVP Manjit

5 years ago #2

#5
Not a chance of that happening. Zidane has left the club on the back of three Champions League victories and he like Zidane knows that the next manager of Real Madrid will be in rebuilding what is an aged team. Pochettino has the exact opposite of that in Tottenham. If anything there is a mad desire for Tottenham supporters to wish that the club makes a big statement by bringing back Gareth Bale, but I think that would be a massive step backwards and helping Real Madrid with offloading what is now an excellent but injury prone Galicatico. As the next manager rebuilds and fails, that will mean that manager is simply setting up the next one. Real Madrid were evidently in decline this year and only a freak of display by the Liverpool goalkeeper helped them win in a year when they could not beat Tottenham in the group stages and finished outside the Top 2 in La Liga. Zidane knows that this is the best time to leave Real Madrid at the highest point of his success and Pochettino knows that this is the worst time to become the manager of Real Madrid. Pochettino signed a new five year deal with Tottenham one week ago, and he of course is Spurs manager to lose, if they don't match him with his transfer needs, while trying to balance the books with a cost overun of their new stadium build which could yet reach 1 Billion pounds. https://www.si.com/soccer/2017/12/05/spurs-stadium-set-cost-estimated-ps1bn-due-complexity-project

CityVP Manjit

5 years ago #1

#1
That is definitely the chief lesson here. Soccer today is a billion dollar business and it is best viewed out of the private boxes it now caters for rather than the view of the fan who shells out thousands of dollars on very expensive season tickets and are still willing to fly out to places like Kiev, while they are working minimum wage jobs. While the history of soccer stems from working class roots (because cricket, golf, tennis and rugby were the sports of the rich), the rise of countries buying football teams a.k.a. Manchester City purchased by the deputy Prime Minister of the UAE. who those in the Middle East will know well as the half-brother of the President of the UAE. This is where we have come when it comes to soccer, nation states basically owning soccer assets. The only way for teams like Tottenham to compete against team ownership the like of Manchester City is to be purchased by the wealthy themselves - in this case the rumour was the buyer could be Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook fame - but that is something different to what we need to be carefui to wish for, for this kind of rumour falls into the class of "wishful thinking". If the modern billion dollar indusry of soccer should teach us one thing - it is that soccer is now a colossal business and whatever new needs its fulfills within us - it is indeed the main reason why soccer or football (as you rightly refer to it) has so many lessons.

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