Tottenham Hotspur

[leffe186]

47 minutes ago, HawK said:

Really appreciate the insight and time taken with your posts, @leffe186

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.

[Yorkie]

1 hour ago, leffe186 said:

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.

 

I wasn't asking if the trophy win meant something/anything though, of course it does. I was asking for your take on the "would you take 17th and a cup win?" contemplation... 

 

1 hour ago, leffe186 said:

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.

 

... which you've answered here. From your point of view, the ends justified the means and you could care less about the league. Fair enough.

 

The matter about the prestige of the Europa League is a separate discussion. I won't knock Spurs' achievement from the point of view of Ange et al identifying the EL as their principle objective and succeeding; but I will knock it from the point of view of it being less of an achievement in a European context.

 

To answer your question: when I was talking about the structural changes, I meant the wholesale shake-up of UEFA competitions to appease the ESL clubs (including Spurs), of which no CL dropouts is just one constituent part. Where previously the EL was Champions League B, I'd argue it's now moreso Conference League A.

[HawK]

9 minutes ago, leffe186 said:

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.

 

Nope, serious. Have a lot of respect for the likes of yourself and Froggy who can seem to rise above the common baiting and goading in foreign territory here.

 

Keep it coming, saves me trawling other fan boards to find other perspectives

[leffe186]

5 minutes ago, Yorkie said:

 

I wasn't asking if the trophy win meant something/anything though, of course it does. I was asking for your take on the "would you take 17th and a cup win?" contemplation... 

 

 

... which you've answered here. From your point of view, the ends justified the means and you could care less about the league. Fair enough.

 

The matter about the prestige of the Europa League is a separate discussion. I won't knock Spurs' achievement from the point of view of Ange et al identifying the EL as their principle objective and succeeding; but I will knock it from the point of view of it being less of an achievement in a European context.

 

To answer your question: when I was talking about the structural changes, I meant the wholesale shake-up of UEFA competitions to appease the ESL clubs (including Spurs), of which no CL dropouts is just one constituent part. Where previously the EL was Champions League B, I'd argue it's now moreso Conference League A.

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? 

[Yorkie]

37 minutes ago, leffe186 said:

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? 

 

Everything about the shake-up boils down to appeasing the ESL clubs, particularly the six PL ones.

 

UEFA has engineered ways to maintain 'elite' club participation in the Champions League. Their first proposals in 2021 literally suggested two high-revenue-generating teams could qualify for the CL even if they underperformed domestically (i.e. that coefficient horseshit). I don't think it's far-fetched to say making the EL easier to win is just that, dressed up as meritocracy.

 

Surprise surprise that two of the three ESL clubs who didn't feature in the CL this season ended up in the EL final. The other absentee is in the Conference League final.

 

As for revenue; all of the clubs who compete in the Champions League get more revenue than the previous format, because there's more games. That probably covers the shortfall they might otherwise have achieved via finishing 3rd and having an EL run.

[Geordie Ahmed]

I think for years the common consensus has been that people don't like the idea of CL teams that failed in the group stages getting to drop into the Europa League

 

(If I was on a laptop and had the time I reckon a search on this forum would support that view)

 

I do think a lot of the criticism or downplaying of the Europa League is because the final was contested between 16th and 17th place in the league, to make sense of a unique situation it's easy for people to just say it's a poor competition now

 

I'd much rather hang fire and see how the competition fares in the coming seasons as I doubt very much we'll get to see the final contested again between two teams underperforming to such a level

 

It's a great win for Spurs and they should rightly celebrate it and will rightly dismiss anyone trying to shit on the achievement just as we rightly dismissed anyone trying to claim the League Cup isn't a proper trophy