Player recruitment has changed

In the Spurs Need To Go Mental series last season I highlighted the need to re-examine our player recruitment policy and that we had to put a lot more specialist work into not just identifying potential signings but into the mental side of their character.



I wrote that Tottenham need to become world leaders in player assessment, an area that wouldn't cost much money but that could reap huge benefits. If a player has skill but doesn't have a mindset that makes him continually try to improve then we should either not sign them or they work with a sports psychologist to instill it.

We have a head coach who has the philosophy of continual improvement, you hear it in his press conferences all the time. That was the first step is putting together a team to transform our player recruitment. From there we re-hired Ian Broomfield, our highly talented former chief scout and head hunted Paul Mitchell as Head of Recruitment and Analysis because of his deeply analytical approach.

Rebecca Caplehorn was then brought in from QPR to become Head of Football Operations and now Paul Mitchell's team have the addition of Rob Mackenzie, brought in from Leicester City as Head of Player Identification.

Mauricio Pochettino trusts Paul Mitchell who has been brought in to source talent that isn't the obvious £30 million player, but players who are right for the Pochettino system whatever their cost. The club strategy is to develop youth so that means players who will improve with us and grow in value. Players do not go to a club and stay there these days so buying a finished article is a short-term solution that you have to keep repeating, hoping you get each new purchase right. That is an expensive business as Lamela, Paulinho and Soldado prove, £73 million spent and basically nothing to show for it.

They are not the type of player Paul Mitchell and Rob Mackenzie are tasked to find, it's people like the unheralded 22-year-old Austrian Kevin Wimmer at FC Cologne. Benjamin Stambouli is growing into his role Eric Dier is a centre-back of the future, he was preferred to Federico Fazio because of his pace against Arsenal.

All clubs undertake biographical profiles of potential purchases, Tottenham o it, but the problem lies in what you do with that information, how you interpret it. Do you overlook certain aspects, do you analyse it to determine a players off the field character and thus have a better idea of what motivates him. We have not been great in interpreting that information, the summer of 2013 was particularly poor.

The appointments of Mitchell and MacKenzie are an effort to address that very aspect. Anyone can compile a biographical profile, that's not the skill, the skill is in interpreting it so fingers crossed we have the right men in place to do that.

We were never going t pay £7 million for players who were available for free in a few months and quite rightly, there was no benefit in these players signing for another club anyway, they can command higher wages and a bigger signing on fee if there is no transfer fee involved. Just because a player is free doesn't make it bad business, quite the opposite.

Winston Reid, Yevyen Konoplyanka and Danny Ings are just three of the targets we hope to secure but come the summer fresh faces will I'm sure also emerge, no doubt the press will link us to world class players but that is pie in the sky stuff. Spurs pay what we feel a player is worth, not what a selling club demands so the £27 million for Schneiderlin, the £25 million for McCarthy will not be entertained, they aren't worth it.

Mitchell and Mackenzie are the two key men now, it's they who determine who we buy, others say yes or no, but it's these guys that are finding the players in the first place, I look forward to the results.

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