leffe186

That’s the Strasbourg owned by Chelsea, too. You can’t argue both ways though. If English clubs are too financially dominant then whoever gets in should piss it, no? Forest, or West Ham, or Chelsea, or whoever. That’s the acid test next year. That said, the whole thing is so obviously broken, and the presence of Strasbourg/Chelsea is just the shitty icing on a shitty cake. If they’re not going to change the Champions league then they have to at least change the Conference to exclude the bigger leagues.

As if there was any soul left to sell.

TBF we got cheated out of winning the European Cup in 1962.

Don’t make me dig up the post where I realize how you qualified for it.

Was gonna say - guaranteed Villa trophy now, no?

Why not? They won ages ago, you’ve got to do something to pass the time.

Oh Jesus, genuinely just remembered that my brother-in-law is a Blade. My sis is Spurs (of course). No football talk there for a while.

Was gonna say. Isn’t it worth them going up so you can put 9 past them next year?

This. Everything flows from the CL expansion.

Someone talked about this in one of the podcasts yesterday (The Fighting Cock?). We lost an absolute shit fest at Palace and Ange said something like the game was poor, bitty and bad-tempered and we didn’t cope with it. They were suggesting Amorim could say the same thing after Wednesday. We didn’t go full shithouse, but we played to the strengths of the team we had.

All our proper creative players were dead, so Ange discovered pragmatism

The meme potential after Wednesday is enormous. Somebody post the one with the managers and their trophies…

Yeah, like I say, I was working backwards, I didn’t see the specifics of the contemplation Just to clarify the nuances about not caring about the league, I only got to that point when the players were dropping like flies, the ones left were out on their feet and we clearly didn’t have enough of a squad left to compete on all fronts. There’s certainly an argument to be made that Ange could have done a better job managing the squad up to that point, but it wasn’t happening. Can’t remember if I’d ditched the league before or after we went out of the domestic cups tbh. I’d love us to have made a fist of the league and the cups, but we just didn’t seem capable of doing so. As far as the dropout changes I didn’t realize that they had come from the ESL guys. What was their reasoning? I would have thought they’d have been to their benefit in giving them extra revenue, as they would be most likely to be the ones in the CL in the first place?

Not sure if serious Been protecting those scars (see above) and not posting too much about football - as a result when I pop the cork you get verbal diarrhoea. Also there is an absolute ton of shit going on in life and this is a welcome safety valve. And other mixed metaphors.

Cheers! Hard to say what the season feels like now tbh. That needs a bit more distance. I feel like this is more of a question about long-term v short term football goals but I’ve got a couple of thoughts so apologies for the dribbling essay about to follow. I feel weird because I’ve been keeping a bit of emotional distance from Spurs despite moving back to North London. Danny Kelly said something in his post-game podcast about the scars you accumulate as a fan and how you protect them. Some of mine are about the game in general, some are about the weird stresses inherent in the way we play, some are about the insidious and traumatic nature about being a dyed-in-the-wool fan (of any team) that is viscerally affected by the game despite recognizing its absurdity . My next-door neighbor is a season-ticket holder. He texted me after work to see if I wanted to go down the pub with him to watch it. My response - verbatim, just checked - was “thank you but I am absolutely terrified”. He said simply “me too”. Of course, I did have other stuff to do (like moving a piano) but I watched the last trophy we won in a pub in Sutton Coldfield and the one before in a pub in Stratford (the East London one). Now I’m old and fragile and tired, and I have to try to seem like a normal person around my kids and my wife. It’s easier to hold things together trying to distract myself from the TV with chores that I’m inventing out of thin air. Is football really trophies over everything? Most local opposition fans - Arsenal, Chelsea, even the odd West Ham fan - have been telling me that for a while. They’ll move those goalposts now - actually some already have done. For me it was always community and family over everything, but really community and family and trophies and good football and progress in a sort of mulch. More satisfying to be good in the league though? - well if you’re old enough, you tell me how satisfied you were with the Keegan years. I’m going to guess broadly incredibly happy and proud but with this weird underlying sense of ultimate unfulfillment. I fucking loved us under Poch for a million reasons, but can‘t deny that the fact he didn’t get to lift a trophy gnaws on me sometimes. I got a call from my eldest today (15F). She was ecstatic because her school day tomorrow is cancelled…because of Spurs’ trophy parade down the High Rd. There you go - community and family and trophies . My Mum’s in North Middlesex Hospital at the moment and she’ll probably be able to hear the parade (she won’t know what the fuck it is, but if she hears Ange’s voice she might think it’s her Dad). That’s part of why it can be more satisfying than an extremely good league campaign. I’ll always want us to get better every year and ultimately win everything all the time and force Arsenal back to South London etc etc. It’s almost self-evident that a good league performance this year would have suggested we were on the right track for progress to world domination, and a Cup win - while promoting self-belief and togetherness - doesn’t necessarily do that at all, certainly not when combined with the shambles in the PL. But I’m happy. There are signs for optimism in the squad, some players have got a long overdue reward, we have got access to the CL gravy train even though we are likely to spill it all down our fronts. And the memes will be fucking glorious for a few months.

Fair enough. I do think there actually were a couple of good teams in the Europa but yeah the financial gulf between every single PL team and most of the rest of Europe has expanded enormously and the format of all the European trophies exacerbates the issue. I just don’t think it’s unreasonable to give one single CL place to the winners of the Europa Cup. It’s an achievement. Less of an achievement for us than it would have been for - say - Bodø/Glimt but I’m perfectly happy for whoever wins it to get in.

It wasn’t as bad as everyone says, but yeah, most of the good teams were in the CL. That’s how it works. We played Galatasaray away and Roma in the qualifiers among some mediocre teams. Then after beating AZ Alkmaar again we beat Eintracht Frankfurt away and stopped them scoring, which hadn’t happened in some silly amount of time. We also managed somehow to confound Kaizero the Soothsayer and beat Bodø/Glimt at their gaff. These are tough games, and winning the Europa League is an achievement, it’s silly to pretend otherwise. Sure, with our resources you’d expect English clubs in the Europa League/Conference to win all the games all the time but, you know, that doesn’t happen. The insane schedule, injuries, bad coaching, really bad reffing - shit happens. And those shit teams that won the FA Cup? Wigan? They got to the final by beating Bournemouth (then in the third division), Macclesfield (non-league), Huddersfield (2nd), Everton (Everton), and Millwall (2nd division). Again, shit happens.

Sorry working backwards! Winning a Cup genuinely means a lot in itself. By God I hope you get that, because you’re a Toon fan of an age where I presume you’ve seen one of the best teams the First Division has seen win nothing at all. If you don’t get that now; after winning your first trophy since Altamont, then I genuinely feel sorry for you. And never, ever look up how you got into the Fairs Cup in the first place. Said it elsewhere, I’ve seen us win a fair few trophies but there are thousands of Spurs fans who have never seen us win one. Now they have. It was an absolute mess of a season. I don’t really care specifically where we finished - once we were safe I only cared about the Cup. We were playing janky lineups, resting players constantly, whatever. I care about how the squad and team are developing, and whether we’re progressing. I think the squad is potentially very strong - we have loads of promising kids and some excellent players under 25 - but lacking true class. I’m just not at all convinced about Ange. I don’t understand what we are doing half the time, but truly, winning a trophy can be a fantastic learning experience so…Christ I dunno. If there’s someone good lined up then great. I’d argue Ange might have done the job we wanted him to do. Here’s the kicker though - I’m not a season ticket holder, don’t have the money. People were paying through the nose to watch - as I’ve said many times - often unwatchable football. That’s inexcusable…if you don’t win a trophy as a result . We kinda did though. We lost our three best most creative players in the run-up, but toughed it out. In an often unwatchable final. Those people still had to spend an absolute fortune watching drivel. You get to do that once I think.

Do you mean the structural changes to all European competitions or specifically the change to not allow CL dropouts a second chance? If the first then of course, letting so many teams into the CL from the top leagues has damaged the prestige of the other cups. If the second, then sure, it’s made it easier to win, and that may have affected the prestige. If you like we can let the losers in each knockout round of the CL in to the latter rounds of the EL. That would also make it harder to win and even more prestigious, no? I never liked that idea, just as I never liked the idea of more clubs getting into the CL. Just seemed wrong to me, and I was glad they ditched it anyway, regardless of the fact that we’ve ended up benefitting. To the first point, again, we’re discussing abstract ideas like “does it exempt the domestic campaign?” From what? Criticism? Of course not! You could make a case for it justifying the domestic campaign when you consider all the injuries and fatigue - justifying playing kids and backups - but the concrete points that are worth discussing are “did we win a trophy which is ultimately the point of the club without considering community etc” (Answer: fucking yes) and “are we going to be better next year and going forward?” Answer: No fucking idea. Would I take it? To get the monkey off our back, yes. Am I still worried about our development, Ange and next year? Yes. I’ll think about this a bit more to answer Checko (somewhere above) but my feeling is (a) Ange is a bit shite as a technical coach/manager of coaches (b) Ange seems pretty good at building togetherness and team spirit (c) We have a young squad with potential that needs both of the above for development. I’ve found us unwatchable - literally unwatchable - for great swathes of this season and I can’t feel happy about Ange staying on. But…he did what he said he’d do. That’s genuinely bonkers. Levy out.

You’re rewarding the team that won the Europa League. You may as well say that when West Ham won the FA Cup in 1980 you can’t reward a Second Division team with a place in Europe, or when Wigan won it and got relegated “you can’t reward them etc”. That’s what it’s a reward for. Where they finished in the league is irrelevant. I quite liked that the winner of the Europa got into the CL tbh, well before we did it. I prefer it to the top four/five teams in the top four/five leagues. Again, that’s the root cause of the problem,

The problem is the expansion of the Champions League. The safety net was allowing people who failed in the CL another chance in the Europa. Taking that away actually makes sense, but without reducing the intake to the CL it runs the risk of what happened this year. Did we earn less money from winning the Europa than you did when getting knocked out of the CL?

Been at work and working backwards 80 taketh away, and 80 giveth. The “Champions League” thing is a good point - the root cause of most of this disdain towards last night was the conversion of the European Cup/Champions’ League to the Champions and a load of other guys. The people who should be in the Europa League are in the Champions League, and the other one (the Conference?) should allow clubs from “poorer” leagues a chance to compete for silverware. It doesn’t, and so obviously a league that is incredibly rich but that also - to its credit - has spread those riches around will dominate. The first part? I dunno lads. It’s bonkers to me as a fiftysomething fan that fans of a club that went my entire life on this planet until a couple of weeks ago without winning a trophy are so dismissive. I’m lucky enough to have seen us win a few trophies, but there are many many Spurs fans who have not, and who saw a terrific team and arguably the best Spurs player of the last 50 years somehow fail to win anything at all. I’ll talk about what the win means in practical terms to Spurs (maybe not a lot) elsewhere, but these somewhat abstract questions about whether people “respect” it, or whether it “elevates” us are kinda pointless. I don’t truly “respect” a single thing Chelsea have achieved since Abramovich, or Man City since Abu Dhabi, and I presume almost all of their fans don’t give the slightest shit.

How old are you (genuine question)?You’ve never understood it? Or you stopped understanding it recently? If you never understood it then you’re just being a bit silly. We could go back to the 80s but let‘s just look at the last 20 years or so. Once Abramovich came in it was Chelsea, Arsenal, Man U, Liverpool, then a lot of other teams without silly money and struggling to break into the CL. Levy decided to strip things back, get a ton of kids in and build for the long term. Eventually we got good enough to be consistently top 5 or 6 - after 4th in 2009/10 we finished at least 6th (and usually higher) until 2021 when we were 7th. We’ve gone through this a million times. We were one of the top six clubs in the league and income for over a decade. It’s really not difficult to understand. Are we one of the top 6 clubs or the “sly 6” or whatever you’re annoyed about? You’d have to define your terms, but I’d guess not, we just finished 17th. To say we’re not a financial juggernaut is a bit peculiar though.

Already done mate. It’s who I am.

Apparently we had 27 different players start games in the Europa, with three others making sub appearances. Feels like that must be some kind of record. They ran out of medals. Just shows what a mess this season has been, and what an bizarre achievement this is.