The way they are playing, I do not think it will Tottenham’s “choice” whether they “throw the game” against Manchester City next week.
No wins in 4 has seen the wheels come well and truly off Ange’s might Hotspurs! Who would have guessed that a fella that had only ever managed in fringe leagues would be found out as tactically inept when trying to compete with the big boys.
Ange Postecoglou beats Mikel Arteta to manager of the year at London Football Awards 2024
Ange winning “London Manager of the Year” in February now looks even more laughable.
A reminder that he was awarded Manager of the Year after only being in London for 5-months with his big achievement being that he was named Premier League Manager of the Month 3 times. That is 3 more times than Pep Guardiola has picked up the Manager of the Month award since December 2021!!!!
At the turn of the year, Tottenham were 5th (which made Ange’s award laughable). They were 1-point behind The Arsenal and 3-behind the league leaders Liverpool.
Roll on to today and Tottenham are now 23 points behind Arsenal – who now lead the league.
Since being named London Manager of the Year, Ange’s record reads: P 10, W 4, D 1, L 5. The last 10 games form table has them in 10th!
It is funny that Tottenham fans will likely celebrate being thrashed at home to Manchester City, and the narrative will be that they stopped us winning the league. The reality is they are just an awful team and a loss to City will be (at best) 5 defeats in their last 6 games.
Spurs fans should just be grateful that they still have Burnley and Sheffield United to face, otherwise they would have risked falling behind Newcastle and Chelsea.
This week has felt a little bit of the calm before the storm. We do have to park what might happen with Spurs (and Fulham) and just concentrate on ourselves.
Whilst Manchester United are in even worse form than Tottenham, I am still damaged with the memory of Arsene Wenger teams losing to very poor Fergie sides. Old Trafford will never be an easy place to go for us.
Lose and City could win the league at Tottenham. Win and (if results go our way), we could be celebrating the league following a Tottenham win.
But then you remember it is Tottenham. And they will not win. Because they are a shit football team. Managed by a fat Aussie Bastard.
“Do not talk about spend, talk about net spend.” The reality is, in football, net spend is actually irrelevant. It means nothing.
The over simplistic stats and infographics are spouted by fans unable to comprehend the more complex methods of accounting in football, and media outlets whose target audience is those fans. The concepts of transfer fee amortisation and player book value are the real factors that make a difference.
Amortisation
By now we should all know what amortisation is.
It came into the public domain when the media delved deeper to explain how Chelsea were spending so much. But amortisation is not a loophole they discovered or invented. It is something that has existed. It is something that I began blogging about way back in 2018.
For those still not up to speed, amortisation is the common accounting practice of spreading the cost of a players transfer fee over the length of their contract.
A common mistake is people that then mix this up with paying the selling club in instalments. One is how you pay for the player (often used to help cash flow), the other is how to account for their outlay.
The easiest way to give this as an example is a £50m player on a 5-year deal has their transfer fee amortised at £10m a year. If that player then leaves for nothing at the end of their contract, a club has not actually made a book loss on them as their fee has been fully amortised – and the net spend junkies will have it down as a £50m loss.
If a player signs a new contract during their existing contract, the value of the transfer still yet to be amortised is then spread out over the length of the new contract.
So after 2 years, our £50m player has had £20m of value amortised. 2 years at £10m a year. He then signs another 5-year deal. The £30m outstanding is then split over the new 5 years – so £6m a year. With the new deal, the club are saving themselves £4m a year in amortised transfer fees.
Book value
At any point during their time at the club, a player has a book value. And it is based on this book value that you can establish whether a club has made an actual profit or loss on the player.
The book value is very simple. It is the difference between the transfer fee spent on the player, minus what has so far been amortised.
If after 2 years we sell our £50m player, he will have a book value of £30m. That means that any sale over £30m is considered, within the accounts, profit. Anything under £30m is a loss. And this is where we need to be aware of how it works.
When you sell a player, the remaining amortised transfer value must be accounted for in that financial year. So if you sell your £50m player for £20m after 2 years, what you actually show is a £10m loss. And even though you might have bought £20m into the clubs coffers, what has actually happened is the deal has cost you £10m
The £20m that has come in is wiped up by the £30m in remaining amortised transfer fee, and you have a further expenditure of £10m to balance the books.
This is why Arsenal were so reluctant to sell Nicolas Pepe.
At £72m, Pepe was costing us £14.4m a year. After 2 years, we still had £43.2m outstanding for him. That means had we cut our losses and sold him for £20m, we would have had to have submitted a total loss of £23.2m.
Whilst some might think “better to get £20m for him not than lose him for £0m in 3 years”, with PSR / FFP it is actually better to retain the player and not have that additional cost hit your accounts.
Pepe’s existing amortisation and wage costs would have been budgeted for. An additional one off loss would not have been and could have led us to losing more that calendar year than PSR allowed.
The final part on book value is with regards to players who have come through your academy. They have a book value of ZERO.
Their zero book value is not because they are worthless, but because they cost the club nothing in amortised transfer fees. Therefore when you sell them, there is not a fee you need to write off. They will be 100% profit.
And this is why you may see clubs like Chelsea sell the likes of Reece James and Conor Gallagher. The pair are captain and vice-captain, but if Chelsea are struggling to balance the books due to the high amortisation costs, the easiest way they can balance the books is selling someone with a zero book value.
Selling players
Book value is perhaps the most important factor for clubs when they are deciding whether to accept a bid for a player that they no longer require.
As we saw with the Pepe example, there is very little worth in selling a player for less than his book value. It does not provide you with any additional income and actually increases your losses for that year.
And due to book value, it is not as simple as “selling £100m worth of players gives us £100m more to spend”.
Selling someone for £40m might generate you a larger profit than selling someone for £60m. Especially if the first player being sold is an academy graduate and the second player was recruited for a huge fee.
Selling Gallagher for £40m will represent £40m profit in Chelsea’s accounts. Meanwhile, selling Mykhaylo Mudryk for £60m would show a £10m loss (based on what would have been amortised on his £88.5m transfer fee spread over his 8.5 year contract).
So whilst selling Mudryk may see a bigger incoming transfer fee, his sale for £60m would see the club increase the losses in their accounts, whilst selling Gallagher for a lower fee would be 100% profit.
Finally, a look at a real example with Arsenal.
In 2021, Aaron Ramsdale joined Arsenal on a 4-year contract for £24m (rising to £30m with add-ons). That is £6m amortised a year. In 2023, he signed a new deal taking him through to 2026.
At that point, the club would have accounted for 2-years worth of amortised transfer fee. At £6m a year that makes £12m. The remaining £12m would have then been re-spread out over his new 3-year deal at £4m a year.
Now fast forward to present day. We are looking to sell Ramsdale this summer. We would have accounted for £16m of his transfer fee, and have £8m remaining. That means any profit is based on his £8m book value, and not the £24m initial fee.
If we sell Ramsdale for £40m, that will represent a £32m profit in our accounts, even though it would only be a £16m “net profit” based on his initial transfer fee.
Final thoughts
If you have made it this fair, thank you. I know these sort of blogs are a little marmite and do not get the hits that “Arsenal look to sign 6′ 2″ 22 goal striker” headlines do. But I enjoy researching and writing this sort of blog, and will never go down the clickbait route.
Knowledge is power at the end of the day, and if you can have even a small amount of awareness of amortisation and book value, it will allow you to better understand how the club operates, and move you beyond the simplistic view of net spend.
I have a small series of these blogs planned, with the next one being to explore the book value of a dozen players that we might look to move on this summer. Understanding their book value will be key to then work out the impact of selling them will have on our transfer budget.
Thanks again for reading, and as always feedback (positive and negative) will be much appreciated.
Over the weekend, news broke that the club were in talks with former keeper Wojciech Szczesny as a replacement for Aaron Ramsdale.
The 35-year-old Juventus number one is on our shortlist to be back-up to David Raya. But I think there is also another former Arsenal keeper we need to be looking at (and no, it is not Lukasz Fabianski).
I have spent quite a bit of time researching who will replace Aaron Ramsdale as Arsenal’s number 2 (like it or not, David Raya is coming in, and Ramsdale will have to leave if he wants first team football).
Alvaro Valles would be top of my list. But the feeling is he wants to remain as a number one and continue to push for the Spain squad. Many pundits in Spain believe he will be a Barcelona player next season.
Throughout my research, one name kept popping up as fulfilling my criteria on a number 2. That criteria is:
Proven number one in a top league
Cheap
Good with the ball at his feet
Likely to be happy being 2nd choice at a Champions League club
That one name that kept popping up was former Arsenal loanee Mat Ryan.
Ryan is currently plying his trade in Holland where he is AZ Alkmaar’s number one. The Dutch team site 4th in the Eredivisie. Having also been number one for Brighton for 3 years in the Premier League, he fulfils that criteria as being proven as a number one in a top league.
You do not play 460 games in top leagues across Europe (and a little Australia), if you are not a decent keeper. Ryan is also closing in on 100 caps for Australia.
Ryan has only been with AZ Alkmaar a season and a half, having joined them in January 2023. He signed an 18-month contract which expires this summer. Not only would Ryan be cheap, he would be free!
Nine years ago, as Ryan was making his name in Europe, a scouting report in The Guardian labelled him a “the Socceroos’ ball-playing goalkeeper with the world at his feet”.
Ryan himself has said in the past that he is inspired by Manuel Neuer, saying “We are a similar style, we’re comfortable with the ball at our feet. We play a high sweeping role there at the back to help out the defence.”
In his own words, Ryan has described exactly what Mikel Arteta demands of a keeper. And having played a lot for Brighton, he has proved that he has the composure to be a ball-playing keeper in the Premier League.
The only question mark is whether he wants to be a number 2.
In 2022 Ryan joined Copenhagen but left after 6-months for AZ due to a lack of playing time. This would maybe point to someone that still wants to play regular first team football, which would rule him out of a move to the Arsenal.
But then there is a huge difference between being second choice at Copenhagen and second choice at a team like Arsenal. At 32-years-old, I am sure he would jump at the chance to spend the last 3 or 4 years of his career living in London, being cover for David Raya.
Arteta would have got a close up view of Ryan when he joined us on loan for the second half of the 2020/21 season. Ryan joined late in January 2021 as it had become clear that Rúnar Alex Rúnarsson was not up to it. Ryan would play 3 times in the Premier League covering for Bernd Leno.
In 2021, Arsenal would decide not to sign Ryan permanently and Ramsdale would be signed instead as new number one. I am fairly certain had we not signed Ramsdale, Leno would have been first choice and Ryan signed as his back up.
It would close the circle nicely if Ramsdale departed this summer and Ryan came in as 2nd choice.
Yes, Mat Ryan might not be the most exciting signing in the world, but he fulfils my criteria of a number 2. And being free means that more money is then available to make more exciting signings elsewhere.
She Wore A Yellow Ribbon 