Not all players are bought for immediate first-team action

What is the criteria when buying a player, does he have to be a first-team player immediately, can we afford to bring someone in and give them time to adapt? Not every signing is a signing where you will throw them straight into the first-team, DeAndre Yedlin would be a fine example.

Not all players are bought for immediate first-team action


He was bought in the summer, loaned back to Seattle Sounders then arrived just before the year ended, he spent New Year Eve with Harry Kane at his house. His first training session was on the 7th January, he played just over an hour for the Development Squad 2 days later and is now playing for the USA in friendlies against Chile and Panama.

Even though we have sold Kyle Naughton we are still giving him time and will give him tasters this season. We refused to let Vlad Chiriches go as he is now right-back cover for Kyle Walker, Yedlin will take over those duties next season.

If we are looking for that kind of signing and Benjamin Stambouli would be another, then we don't look at the finished article, we look a step below that, a player who is well on the way there but needs some fine tuning. Stambouli has been brought along steadily, given time to adapt so he will challenge for a first-team place in a few months, as we see he now does.

Age is an important factor as that gives time for improvement and the increase in a players value if he decides to move on after a few years. A club can not survive if it simply buys players and has to sell them a few years later at a loss, it's not a sustainable business model.

A free transfer gives us more bargaining power so each season all players coming to the end of a contract are scoured and any of interest are statistically analysed. There is software out there that compiles all this information and it's available at the touch of a few buttons. From there a list is created and then it's a question of deciding which to go and watch.

Munoz (Palermo), Ings (Burnley), Reid (West Ham), Ayew, André-Pierre Gignac (both Marseilles), Konoplyanka (Dnipro), Adriano (Shakhtar Donetsk), Milner (Manchester City), Schär (Basel), we have been linked with them all but of course we won't be the only club after them.

All of this is done to Mauricio Pochettino's specifications of the type of player he wants., Mitchell and Mackenzie do the analytics.