oldtype

They'll probably still turn a profit. It's bad for the player and bad for the game in general but not particularly bad for Spurs.

I wouldn't be surprised if some players and agents (probably rightly) assume that it's impossible for us or anyone else to break into the top six under the current regime of financial regulations.

We can also pay higher wages than Sunderland or other similar clubs.

It's a no brainer for cartel clubs to stockpile promising 20-23 year olds in general because they have the PSR headroom to do so and worst case scenario they can sell them on in 1-2 seasons for a mild loss. They have the money to do it, it gives them a chance of hitting on a really good player, and if they don't they can force lower-tier clubs who need the handdowns to subsidize part of their losses. It's not targeted at us specifically but it is the optimal strategy for maximizing their (completely unfair) financial advantage. It's so bad that I think we're getting to a point where going after older players might actually be an exploitable market efficiency.

Villa don't really go after players that the top six would want, and to be fair maybe that is the optimal strategy for a club in our position. (They also have a much better youth pipeline than we do).

It's a fair point that maybe we should be looking more towards gazumping the Everton, Brighton, and Bournemouths of the world than getting gazumped ourselves by bigger clubs. (I say this with full awareness that we just lost out on a signing to Brighton )

Same principle applies to Liverpool v. Madrid as it does to us v. Liverpool. If Madrid was interested in the player and the player was interested in Madrid there's no way Liverpool can beat them to the signing, regardless of whether negotiations are being leaked to Romano or not.

I mean sure but I see no benefit to being disappointed three months in advance.

It's June.

Separate and apart from all of my prior points, it's also hard for us to incentivize given that the agent is making a percentage of the contract value as a baseline and that is going to be much much higher if he goes to a cartel club. That's part of why they try so hard to make it happen.

If there has been even some inkling of future interest registered in the past, not a single chance the agent lets his client sign anything without at least doing due diligence with Liverpool.

I know but football transfers are a completely inbred weirdo market which I'm sure is very different from whatever normal stuff you are merging and acquiring.

In conclusion, this all sucks and I'm sure there are ways our transfer practices could be improved, but speed isn't one of them. Unless we're talking about moving an entire window in advance, speed is irrelevant to our ability to beat cartel clubs to a signing. We just can't.

It's worth noting that the actual time that the deal is being discussed bears no relationship whatsoever of the time that leaks appear in the media. Again, would be very surprised if his agent wasn't talking to Liverpool on background from the moment we made our bid.

Even right now I think we are a bigger draw than Milan. It's mostly just the top six and Bayern/Barcelona/PSG/Madrid that we have no hope against.