- Jan 24, 2016
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Basically. There's an entire book with the name "brave" in the title, and the word is used pretty gratuitously, but he talks about how he likes to do things:
"Sometimes club presidents and chairman appoint a coach because of his CV, but until they make a real connection, they don't truly understand what they've brought to the club. Spending so many hours together helped Daniel get closer to how we think,"
"We spoke about being more effective, about strategies, about how we can improve and become more competitive. About why I prefer to give homegrown kids chances rather than signing players, and the problems that can be caused by buying players you don't need.
"Leaving a signing on the bench is not the same as having an academy graduate as a bench-warmer."
"A chairman and a manager can only really talk football at a superficial level. But I was able to explain to him in detail how, the more defined your playing style is, the more difficult transfers become, because either a player gives you something specific you're lacking, or you're better off not signing anyone."
I can only see this as follows: Pochettino is not convinced that just 'buying players for the sake of buying players' is worthwhile. Imo, history suggests Levy loves transfer wrangles, and would probably sign 10 players each window if he could - but Poch wants quality over quantity. With that in mind, it just wouldn't surprise me if he said "If we can't sign (Zaha/Grealish/Martial), then we sign nobody", on the basis that signing a lesser player would mean less money available, and yet another player to move on in the future.
Maybe it's a combination of Poch's admiration of Fergie and his philosophies (complimenting youth academy players with one specific 'big' first-team style player each year), the book quotes about "don't sign a player unless he's worth signing (paraphrasing the above)", and the bits about preferring club-grown players (lots of quotes and behaviour patterns behind this one).
Either way, I don't think Poch is on the same wavelength as people's expectations of quantity over specific qualities. I can only imagine the plan will be to see how Zaha, Martial and Grealish get on over the next 4 months, baring in mind how much outlay is involved, then perhaps revisit in January - if required.
It's all guesswork and a bit of 1+1 with it all, but I just can't see that Levy and Poch have suddenly become different people overnight. If we're being honest with ourselves, I think we all know that Levy would have signed a few last-minute deals today if it had been 100% down to him - I can only imagine Poch has vetoed any squad fillers (and looking at what other clubs signed, there wasn't a lot of value for money going on).
That doesn't explain earlier activity, but I do think that if anyone was frustrated by today's window end, it would have been Levy. Poch would have had his moments of angst when we got sold a kipper over the 3 main (obvious) targets.
Then our failure was to attract any of Zaha, Grealish or Martial. They each had a price. We would have known what it was. We, allegedly, had plenty of cash. Clubs that have money (which these days is all of them) aren't under any pressure to sell so low-balling them is not going to work. Getting a bargain is probably a thing of the past too. The market is inflated, pay the fees or get out and stop trying to convince your punters that they should pay luxury money if you're not prepared to bankroll a luxury product. You can't have it both ways.