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By Tony Attwood
If you wanted to harm a professional football club in terms of its results what would you do? I know it is a bit of an odd question, but consider it for a moment and see where it leads. Given recent history as your evidence, what might you suggest the club should do?
- Build a new stadium and suggest that the building of the stadium had no impact on the club being able to buy players – when it fact it would, and it always does. Players cost money, and often that money has to be borrowed. If the club already has significant debts, building a stadium is not a good idea.
- Have a change of ownership and directors with at least one being found guilty of criminal activity in relation to finances. Clubs that borrow money have to show that they are clean in their financial dealings.
- Have Donald Trump pardon a director and give him a get out of jail free card.
- Pretend in public statements that everything is ok, under control and being run according to a well thought out plan.
- Change managers very regularly indeed, making sure each time that the blame for the failure of the manager is totally down to the manager, and not to the owner or chairman who appointed the wrong person. Indeed it is vital that absolutely no blame for anything should be attributed to any owner until he has left the club.
- Fail to get a naming sponsor for the stadium after announcing during the building process of the hyper expensive new stadium that this was a central plank of the financing of the stadium.
- Claim the stadium will only hold six concerts a year, but then unilaterally up that to 30 concerts, thus annoying all the residents nearby, as well as publicly advertising the fact that the club is liable to make announcements without thinking things through. Then fail to attract concert organizers who fancy putting on a concert in your venue – thus effectively annoying concert goers and non concert goers alike, while bringing in no money at all, and making the club look utterly stupid
- Get the financial so wrong that the club ends up with the biggest debt of any European football club at £1,177 billion with no viable way of getting that debt reduced while sitting on a stadium that is not paid for while being unable to pay for it.
- Fail to get a single reasonable bid for buying the naming rights because of the toxic nature of the stadium’s reputation in the world of business and the dislike of the stadium by club supporters who start to blame the stadium for the subsequent failure of the club to rise up the league.
- Lose a third of your home football games since moving in.
We speak of course of the Tottenham Hotspur Sponsored Stadium without a Sponsor The club we are told is looking £400 million for a 20-year deal. Curiously no one seems to be interested, perhaps because Tottenham H have lost one third of their home games since 2019. Which is quite a lot really.
Obviously this is not their only problem, as there is chatter about what many consider a poor transfer strategy, leading to poor results and also about the high ticket prices, which of course can become acceptable if a club is top of the league but less so when the club is losing games. It took six games from the start of this year for the club to win a match, which really is not very good. Worse, the ground has not sold out recently and the club is being heavily criticized by its own supporters.
Suggesting the club might buy some more players is a bit silly at such a time, as it merely brings the suggestion that they ought to have bought the right players in the summer. And that is a big part of the problem since it suggests that a) the club doesn’t know what it is doing and b) sees its supporters as so stupid and dim that they will believe any old excuse that is offered. Losing to West Ham doesn’t help much either especially when it gave WHAM their first win in a couple of months. Nor does having the Guardian call the club “mentally and physically weak while describing their actual football as quite simply, “dreadful”.
Indeed it is interesting that the Guardian is now actively questioning “Whether sacking the manager changes anything, while in the past calling for managerial replacement has been the first move, although they also note that “the relationship between the crowd and the team looks broken.”
In short Tottenham have got their move to the new ground totally wrong, in contrast to Arsenal who handled their move by managing expectations. But worse they add, “It is hard to see how Spurs change course. They have two wins at home in the league this season. Everybody seems to hate each other.”
They are as the newspaper suggests, “stuck in limbo.” It would be sad if it were not quite so funny.
