A Bola are saying it's a done deal and he'll be presented on Monday. He also wants to bring Moutinho with him. I'm hoping TG will be able to share my Moutinho love next season, AVB ain't bad either.

www.abola.pt/nnh/ver.aspx?id=339075

Wouldn't signing moutinho eat all of the modric money?

This seems like a much better idea for AVB than chelsea. he's going to effectively have a completely blank slate at spurs, with zero lampard/drogba style issues. He also has the foundations of a very strong young squad, and and enough money to make a decent splash.

With vertonghen and sigurdsson coming in, and naughton and caulker coming back from loan, they only really need a new goalkeeper, a long term replacement for BAE, a playmaker, cover for bale, and a top level striker and an understudy. Then they would have a very strong, well balanced young squad, and mightn't suffer that second half of the season collapse.

This is very bad news for arsenal btw.

So they just need six more players...

The Awesome Berbaslug!!! wrote:


He might not cost an insane amount of money. Sporting still own a percentage of him and they're completely broke, Porto aren't doing much better financially - I reckon £17-20m would easily secure his signature.

Porto have just announced they've signed Adrien Silva, another unwanted Sporting product who has succeeded at Académica. He does a similar job to Moutinho, but nobody can do it like Moutinho. He's definitely going to move and Spurs would do really well to get him.

Won't Spurs have the same problem attracting a player of Moutinho's quality as keeping one of Modric's quality? CL football and wages?

So they just need six more players...

hah, To be fair, that's how far they are from having a strong well balanced squad. They could get away without signing a left back or a goalie maybe, but they need to replace modric, and Adebayor, saha and possible defoe. All the talk in the press is of Moutinho and sturridge. Sturridge is out of favour at chelsea, and coming into the last year of his contract. it will be interesting to see if he prepared to lower his wage expectations, as he leaves the world of sugar daddy clubs, having burned all his bridges.

That would leave them looking for a centre forward to replace adebayor, and someone to replace defoe, who could cover for bale on the left side of attack.

Assuming that vertonghen and siggurdson sign, and that AVB gets his two players this is the squad he will be taking over

----------------------Friedel (40)/ *
W'ker(22)/n'ghton(23)---(vert'gn)(26)/dawson(29) /caulker(20) /kaboul(26)---BAE(27) /Rose(22)/*
Parker (31)/lv'more(23)/sandro(23)--(m'tinho 25) /pienaar(31)/hdlstone(25)
Lennon(25)/(Strdge)(23) ----- (Sigurdson)(22)/VDV(29)---- Bale(23)/*
-------------------------- */*

Out: King, corluka, krancjar, Saha, nelsen, Adebayor.
For Sale: Gallas, Gomes, dos santos, cudicini, bassong, bentley, jenas, defoe, Modric

Spurs made a net profit on players of £35 million last season. They've already taken in £12 million for the two croatians, with modric likely to make 3 times that amount. The more of those players they shift, the greater their budget to bring in the last couple of players.

Looking at that squad above, if they can sign a good keeper, a long term replacement for BAE, A centre forward, and a left sided striker, they will have a very strong, deep, well-balanced squad, which will enable them to rotate their players more effectively, but also they will be a very young energetic team, with a lot of room for improvement.

The more of those players that they shift off that list of the damned, the more money and wages they will have to throw at the problem. If AVB can get them playing to at least the sum of their parts, then third place should be the least of their expectations. If he gets moutinho and sturridge, he's only a couple of signings short of a team that will only need minor tweaking over the next three or four years.

Arsenal and chelsea fans should be very afraid.

Won't Spurs have the same problem attracting a player of Moutinho's quality as keeping one of Modric's quality? CL football and wages?

I would assume that spurs would be able to pay him 80-100k a week, and if he's going to move to the premiership, it may as well be to join AVB, the manager who made him look like a superstar. A couple of decent years in the premiership and he will be able to pick his club and name his price should he so choose.

The worry for spurs has to be that either man utd will start sniffing around him, or that the price will start to spiral. Porto like to charge, and Steveeeee's talk of £17 million for a pini zahavi player at porto is insane.

I note that no Spurs fans have yet posted on this thread, and it makes me nervous to be first do so.

I recognise Steve9's historical affection for AVB, and I'm undecided as to for and against: I fear a Ramos-esque experience; a repeat of his Chelsea league performance but a few rungs lower, if you like.

I also doubt our ability to secure Moutinho without CL football to tempt. Spurs, amongst the teams with ambitions to be top four, don't have the highest wage ceiling. We were paying Anderton £70k p/w in 2000, and things haven't markedly gone up since then to the best of my knowledge. No complaint, but it's clear there are others out there who would offer more.

We, ideally, would like to find three strikers from somewhere. Hugely expensive unless rabbits come out of hats.

Maybe too early for predictions for next year, but top six looks realistic at this point. Much can change though as we have no first team management currently at the club.

Well the story is that AVB is going to be appointed on monday.

I can see why spurs fans might be a bit nervous after the chelsea debacle. It was a terrible situation, and he didn't handle it well. But the spurs job is very different.

The first is that the squad he is going to inherit, is basically only going to have five players over 28, (BAE, Dawson, VDV) and one over 30 (parker, pienaar) He will be working with a young squad, who will have the legs to implement his high tempo game, and crucially will be more likely to buy into his grand vision, than seasoned veterans looking to preserve their place in posterity.

There are going to be no old pros to be gently phased out (apart from possibly parker, who is a different kettle of fish to terry and lampard) He will have carte blanche to remake the midfield and attack to his specifications, and while he won't have full control over who the club buys, He won't have to accommodate some Fernando torres figure.

Unlike Ramos he speaks perfect english, and english football has come on a long way in 5 years. The other thing that he has over ramos is that he has a very clear idea of how he wants to play, and it was very successful at porto. whatever system ramos wanted to play, it was going to be heavily compromised by not having that sevilla director of football, who kept finding brilliant players for him to pick.

So I suppose it comes down to money. You mention there about spurs wages, and until this season they have had a £80k a week wage limit, but I suspect that may have been broken for bale's new contract. The point is that outside of Sugar daddy clubs, and the big two in spain, that's about as much as anyone can offer.

Something else to consider is that Spurs have the sixth highest wage bill in the premiership. It's generally 60-70% of liverpool's or arsenal's. However because they keep their wage/turnover ratio at around 55% they are able to do things like outbid liverpool for Sigurdsson, because there is always room for them to go that bit extra if they need to. liverpool missed out because they are already heavily over-committed on the wage front.

Last season they responded to missing out on the cl by moving on seven players, and taking in a lot of money, with no impact on the team. They look like repeating the feat on a bigger scale this season.

Basically between transfer fees and savings in wages, AVB should have enough resources available to him this summer to properly overhaul the team and buy the six players mentioned above. If he makes a decent job of buying them spurs will have a very strong squad. if he makes a very good job of these signings then spurs will have a very good first team.

Something else to consider is that at the end of next season the new TV contract kicks in, and a club in the top six like spurs is looking at an automatic increase in income of in the region of £30 million. You're talking about the equivalent of qualifying for the CL every year. If spurs were to finish fourth, they would earn nearly as much from their tv deal as ac milan or juventus.

if they were to qualify for the CL their income would spiral further, and in the medium term, if they were to build a new stadium, they would become a permanent fixture in the top ten richest football clubs, even if they didn't qualify for the CL.

I suppose the challenge for spurs for next season is to finish ahead of arsenal, liverpool and newcastle, and to be honest, you'd have to fancy spurs' chances with that lot, even if it does take time for AVB and the new signings to bed in.

The Awesome Berbaslug!!! wrote:


If he doesn't move now, that massive money deal to a Man Utd or Barcelona will never happen (however, Barcelona have been tracking him for some time now). Moutinho knows he needs to move, Zahavi too and I reckon he'll go for under £20m. Meireles is half the player Moutinho is, but he's still a great player and he left Porto for next to nothing on poor wages just to get a chance in the Premiership.

So, CL football really isn't an issue for Moutinho or any player in Portugal. Getting to play in the Premiership, where the most average of players get more in a week than te biggest stars in Portugal earn in a month is the key. Money and exposure

If he's together with AVB, it'll be a success.

hmm. fair enough, but porto have sold fredy guarin to inter for €11 million, and they look like selling Hulk for an outrageous sum to chelsea. They're under no pressure to sell moutinho, he has 3 years left on his contract, he's a much more important player to them than meireles, and already much more famous. If they can get a bit of an auction going, he could turn out to be a very expensive player indeed.

Things could get interesting if spurs are the only club interested though.

on a side issue, what is this james rodriguez like. There's a lot of talk about man utd being interested if nani doesn't play ball on this new contract.

I really like James, he could become a world great. Still only 19, he had a stunning second half of the season in 2010/11, prompting me to start a thread hypothesizing the possibility of Colombia winning WC2014. He was good again last season, his substitute cameo against Benfica at the Luz probably being the most influential and important display of any player in the league that season - he effectively won Porto the match single handedly and guaranteed them the league title.

This video shows it, along with awful music and terrible comentary:
youtu.be/gYPMPVBIT0s

My only criticism is that he is easily bullied on the pitch by bruising defenders and when he starts games he can be quite anonymous - but the potential is clearly there.

Latest news on Moutinho is that there's going to be a bidding war between Spurs, Chelsea, Man Utd and Liverpool, but you have to take these things with a pinch of salt:
www.abola.pt/nnh/ver.aspx?id=339393

Villas Boas will also lose €13m to take the Spurs job. He was being paid £100,000 a week by Chelsea until either the 25 months of his contract ran out or he took work elsewhere.

When Ramos was hired by Spurs I talked about it with a Catalan co-worker of mine who pooh-poohed him as a manger, saying that he always used the same system with every club, that of having interchangeable fullback and midfielders constantly swapping positions and overlapping each other and that he'd mainly been successful at Sevilla because of Adriano and Alves (along with a few other good players in those positions).

So while both AVB and Ramos failed in English football coming over and trying to implement their systems, AVB's system is much more better-tuned to Tottenham's squad and hopefully the flameout at Chelsea have helped him grow as a manager. As tAB! has pointed out, he's also unlikely to have the same "player power" problems at Spurs, so long as they move on Gallas and keep VdV from being disruptive.

Very interesting appointment, if true.

I was one of the Chelsea fans who thought he deserved more time in the job but subsequent events would seem to vindicate the decision to dismiss him. As Tactical Genius mentioned at the time of his sacking with better man management he could have coaxed more out of his senior players, instead he alienated them. Then theres the issue of him not playing youngsters (which counteracts the whole "he's here to overhaul the squad" rationale as to why he got the job), the fact that he didn't abandon the highline defence until December even though it was proving unsuccessful long before then and his mishandling of the media. I wonder if he will get a pass for that now that he is at a new club?

Anyway, I'm very intrigued to see if he has learned from his mistakes and how he will do at a club with a stronger mandate from the boss. It promises to be a really great storyline heading into the 2012/13 season.

That chelsea job was quite difficult though. Roman wanted him to overhaul the squad, renew the team, and completely change their way of playing.

However he had to do it without dropping roman's favourite aging stars, being able to choose which players they signed, and blaming him when the clubs big names were unable to play in any other way. chelsea may have miraculously won the champions league next year, but there is no sign that they have made any real progress whatsoever in improving and overhauling their squad, and I can't help feeling that they will be relying on an arsenal collapse to make it into the CL slots next year.

The question really has to be is roman prepared to go through the painful process of rebuilding the team, or is he going to view that pain as a failing on the part of a manager, and sack him.

Aside from issues with personalities, man management and the difficulties in getting to grips with the complex policies involved in being the manager of Chelsea, AVB also got it very tactically wrong there.

He had his system and he wanted the players to fit it rather than necessarily the other way round when it became clear it wasn't working. He did back off a little but by that time all the other factors had taken over anyway.

So is he going to try and implement his Porto / Barcelona - lite tactical system on Tottenham's squad? If he is the questions remain, will he have the players to carry it off and can that sort of system ever really work in the Premiership anyway? I have my doubts.

The Awesome Berbaslug!!! wrote:

You say that, but apart from Terry, Cole (both 31) and Lampard (34), and the increasingly peripheral Malouda (32) and Ferreira (33, thought he'd gone to be honest), they haven't got anyone over 30 in their outfield squad.

De Bruyne and Hazard are 21, Marin is 23 and they're got a number of first-teamers under the age of 25.

So while there's still the issue of the "big beasts", they have refreshed their squad to some extent.

Seems like a decent move to me - a month or so back, I was getting a tad concerned with all the 'Moyes'-talk, tbh.

Modric sold out of the Prem though, please. Let's not make the same mistakes as before, eh?


Where have I heard that before..?

And Moutinho is now making the right noises to join him. I'd be very excited if I were a Spurs supporter. In fact, if AVB and Moutinho are at Spurs next season, I will be a Spurs supporter.

Moutinho backs AVB

"All I do know is he did a fantastic job at Porto. He didn’t win the league title and the Europa League by chance.

But then he had a set of players who bought into his ideas and were enthusiastic and supportive.He was very much like Pep Guardiola was at Barcelona. He loved to deploy systems to bring the best out of the players.

I remember talking to him about England when he was poised to leave. He was so enthusiastic, he was so determined to make a success of it. AVB isn’t the type to want revenge, his only motivation is to prove to people that he can be a success in England."

The bit in bold contradicts dalliance's opinion somewhat. But what does Moutinho know compared to dalliance?

AVB was stitched up by the players at Chelsea. Anyone who believes Di Matteo can get the bunch of prissy geriatrics above 5th place next season is out of their mind.

He may have been stitched up but he also gave the impression that, from a man management PoV, he lacked maturity. Whether that was down to his youth alone, his inexperience with English football, or his inability to get veteran players to buy into his ideas I can't say, but on certain occasions it was clearly the case.