Selling your biggest star and expecting to spend the exact same money on other players doesn’t always work out. Tottenham could have asked Liverpool who went through the same ordeal two years earlier, but Daniel Levy, Franco Baldini and Andre Villas-Boas, even if his mistakes were on the pitch and not in the transfer room, refused to look in the right direction.
Tottenham have spent nearly £110 million over the summer on players like Paulinho, Nacer Chadli, Roberto Soldado, Etienne Capoue, Vlad Chiriches, Christian Eriksen and Erik Lamela. Basically, a whole new squad to try and replace a player that carried Spurs almost to the Champions League on his own. However, instead of trying to keep the squad intact and only making the right kind of signings to improve the areas most needed, Baldini and Levy decided to go all out and spend every bit of money they got from selling Bale. However, it also meant that the club itself didn’t put up any money for new players – only rolled on their profits from the Real Madrid deal.
So Levy might be an excellent businessman in getting the most from the product he’s selling – Luka Modric and Gareth Bale to Real Madrid were excellent deals for Tottenham. But instead of looking to fill in a spot or two in the lineup, Tottenham, and mostly through Baldini, bought any player they could get their hands in. From what seems to be coming out now, there wasn’t too much of a connection between Baldini-Levy and Villas-Boas, growing distant with time.
If only they would have looked to the past and differences between Manchester United and Liverpool to see how this should be handled. Alex Ferguson wasn’t in a rush to spend the money he made from selling Cristiano Ronaldo to Real Madrid. He brought in Antonio Valencia for 20% of that price and a few more cheap deals that were for overall bolstering of the squad, but weren’t made to revolutionize what didn’t need that kind of drastic change.
Liverpool sold Fernando Torres for £50 million to Chelsea, but immediately spent almost 70% of that money on Andrew Carroll, for some reason no one really knows to this day. Liverpool already had Luis Suarez, and didn’t need to spend that kind of sum on another striker just because they got the money to spend.
Maybe Andre Villas-Boas is really something of a semi-fraud. A good looking Latin manager who speaks good English but is a bit too arrogant, letting praise go to his head for being a “tactical genius”, but someone who apparently can’t hold on to a dressing room. But it’s also the men above him, who forgot Tottenham is only the third biggest club in London, and being 7th in the Premier League isn’t a disaster, and there’s no reason to spend more than any other team in the league in order to preserve that spot.