Spurs join Europe's elite

By Sunshine...who else?
July 7 2004

Once upon a time, with only a couple of exceptions (Postiga springs to mind….and just as quickly falls to the floor and asks for a penalty), Spurs fans more or less used to know what players Spurs were after.

The ‘hunting ground’ for our transfers was pretty limited and the people involved in transfer dealings couldn't seem to keep their mouths shut.

It was considered ‘exotic’ to go to Inter and get Dr Evil (the second of my aforementioned exceptions….muahmuahmuahhhhh) on loan for a season.

Things have changed somewhat.

There are still, of course, a load of wide, flapping mouths (which usually belong to a player’s agent or a selling team wishing to drum up interest and perhaps even an auction for one of their employees) who spill the beans to the pathetic hacks who spend their time dreaming of the big exclusive and hanging round street corners, sniffing for titbits.

However, one man has shown that it is possible to beat these vile creatures at their own game. Neo of the Matrix, other wise known as Luciano Moggi, the most famous Director of Football (Direttore Sportivo) in Italy.

Crafty Luciano is as close to the footballing equivalent of The Sopranos as you will ever get. He is intelligent, underhand, amusing, hard, wistful and cunning. He plies his trade for the most powerful ‘family’ in Serie A, known simply as ‘The old lady’, or Juventus.

There is nothing lucky about Luciano, he reigns over the transfer market 24/7, 365 days a year, not just when it kicks in proper during the January and summer transfer windows. He speaks to the tabloids, goes on TV chat shows, participates in Phone Ins and his ‘verses’ leave more to the fertile imagination than those of Nostradamus. He has a finger in every pie and legend has it that when he runs out of fingers, he uses toes.

Luciano is the one who brought players of the calibre of Zidane, Trezeguet, Henry, Vieri, Nedved, Buffon, Zambrotta, Davids and Thuram to Turin. Sure, Henry left after disappointing, but Luciano isn’t the Manager and has to accommodate the coach’s wishes. The money gleaned from the sale of Henry (£10m) was immediately invested in Trezeguet, an eminently saleable asset who, despite his injury problems, is still a 20 goal a season man….in the notoriously difficult Serie A.

Mr Moggi is the man who lied to the late, great (uncrowned King of the nation) Gianni Agnelli, owner of Juventus, selling first Vieri and, a few years later, Zinedine Zidane from under his nose. Zidane, at 29 years of age, was offloaded to Real Madrid for £50m. £50m for a 29 year old. This, after having picked him up for relative peanuts and gotten the best years out of him.

Moggi buys players and uses them as pawns, swapping them with yet other players until he manages to snare his real target. If he wants to do business with a club and he knows that they are after some player, then he will purchase that player and use him as bait. His mind games are endless and make the likes of Ferguson and Wenger look like they’ve learnt their tricks from one of those ‘Guides for Idiots’.

Have Juventus been successful? Domestic domination aside (they’ve won two of the last three Serie A titles, 27 overall), if you except this season, they’ve been in 4 Champions League Finals in the last 8 years. More impressively still, all this has been done without going into debt. Juventus break even or, oddly enough, make a profit almost every season….despite a wage bill that would make even the richest sides in Europe wince.

What has all this got to do with Spurs? Well, I’ve noticed that a sea change has come about in the way Spurs are doing business and my guess is that our very own Frank Arnesen has been taking notes from ‘Il maestro’, Luciano.

We’re oh so quick to blame the press for making up stories regarding the players we’re interested in and rival fans are just as eager to pour scorn over our alleged efforts to sign players, but what if the plain truth were that Arnesen is playing us all, media, fans and rivals, like a musical instrument. Leading us up false paths, letting us believe we’re in for someone, only to find out that the real target was a player that no one had thought of or, even more tantalisingly, one of the many that had been mentioned?

Arnesen is famed for having myriads of contacts in the game and his knowledge of players, their availability and, probably, their aspirations. Talk is rife about Spurs signing Tudor, but Dellas is also reported (and not just in England) as being a small step away from pulling on the lilywhite top. Davids is supposedly top of the wish list, but wait, out pops the name of Sean Davis: Surely we can’t be in for both? Lizarazu, Thuram, Wiltord….not so long ago, at least two of these players looked odds on to join forces with Santini at The Lane.

Spurs fans will go mad trying to second guess Arnesen. Rival fans will only make themselves look foolish when they criticise his transfer market tactics, since they are the ones which put him and his like at the top of the food chain.

Clubs with far less vision than Spurs will come to regret not having moved with the times….Britain, at least in this context, is no longer an island.