The sectionable supremo said:
“We strongly believe to have a sustainable football club you need to have an Academy that produces players for your first team.
“When you have players that come through the academy they have Spurs in their blood and I think you tend to get more out of a home-grown player than just buying in a player.”
“We weren’t a club that could continue spending tens or hundreds of millions of pounds each year and we had to find a way to break that deadlock.” he added.
“That’s why the academy was so important. Building a world-class [training] facility was part of the foundation to try to achieve a better quality first team through a production line of youth.”
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In principle what he suggests is inspired stuff.
In practise, you’ve more chance of winning the lotto than Spurs have in producing anything that could be referred to as ‘a production line’ unless you were thinking of British Leyland in the 1970s.
In fact, on Levy’s watch, since taking over in 2001, the Academy has gone the same way as trophies.
The list of players that haven’t made it at Spurs eclipses the one name that has.
Nabil Bentaleb FAIL
Tom Carrol FAIL
Stephen Kelly FAIL
Stephen Caulker FAIL
Jake Livermore FAIL
Ryan Mason FAIL
Alex Pritchard FAIL
Andros Townsend FAIL
Harry Kane SUCCESS
So once we peek through the smoke and mirrored marketing spiel aimed at the yanks, we effortlessly prove that Daniel’s US charm offensive was by and large, complete cobblers!