You have a choice. You can buy a football team’s worth of international megastars. It’ll cost you 300 million quid, the cost of Man City’s starting line-up on Saturday when they play Brighton (31 million; the whole team, less than City’s goalkeeper). Or you can buy cheaper players. Maybe those with prospects, the young ones, the old ones, those with potential not yet realised, and price tags that reflect that. Obviously, if you buy a 50 million pound footballer, you can’t pay him minimum wage. If he’s worth that much he’s going to need to earn north of 120-150k a week, minimum. Then 3 weeks later, his agent is bemoaning the fact that another player on the team earns 200k a week and ‘our boy’ feels devalued, humiliated, ashamed to park his Bentleys in the car park.

But the problem with the ‘economy model’ is that you must always be careful what you wish for. In Spurs case Pochettino built a team of, in the most part, cheap players. Harry Kane was from the youth academy. Dele Alli, 5 million quid from Milton Keynes. Christian Erikssen, bargain, Kyle Walker, bargain, Vertongen, Danny Rose, Eric Dier, all cheap and young. And did exactly what Spurs hoped, dreamed, lusted for them to do. They became Stars. So here’s the kicker, though it should be no surprise to anyone really: they now want to be paid as the 60 million pound Superstars that they have undoubtedly become. They’re all earning (a paltry!) 50 thousand pounds every fucking week (in Danny Rose’s case, 40 of those weeks in hospital care and the physio’s office), and are suffering from Neymaria. Which is like Malaria but much more expensive.

Danny Rose is probably the best left back in Europe, if not the world. Every Spurs fan loves him because of the wonder goal he scored against Arsenal and everyone suddenly took notice. And Danny, from his sick-bed, has now spoken out against Spurs’ pay policy and effective 100k a week ‘cap’. Unsurprisingly he now has a lot of support from the rest of the Spurs squad. And the absolutely revolting thing is; Danny is right. And Spurs are in a bit of trouble.

This has nothing to with ‘real worth’, or ‘value’ or ‘how far would all that money go in the NHS?’ This is not Corbyn-land. This is football. And words like ‘value’ and ‘worth’ have no value or worth of their own. Football exists outside of the real world and massive bubble, made of 50-pound notes, funded by tv rights and the vanity of narcissistic international squillionaires, (Russians and Arabs) or businessmen looking to cash in (Yanks). The old ‘model’ of a football club being a ‘family’ is nothing more than a quirk of history. Paris St Germain is a ‘family’ like ISIS is a family. Some would say a rather appropriate analogy.

Spurs chairman Daniel Levy is a clever and canny man, no doubt about it. But I think his pay structure could be his downfall. All my boys will leave. They have the distant cousins of their agents to think about. Would you work for £50 a day when someone else (albeit a slimy, sleazy Qatari) is willing to pay you £100?

I worry about Lila’s first Spurs match and what it will look like.

Happy Friday, DANNY!!!!

A xxxx