2015/2016 Tottenham Hotspur - End of Season Review

Season End

The end of my second season has come, and to me it feels like it has come a lot quicker than the previous season. This is probably due to the fact in all honesty, I’ve had the most frustrating end to a season possible with incredibly disappointing results, highly mediocre player performances and numerous injury set-backs. Therefore getting to the end of the season was my primary objective so I could begin my reshaping of the team.

I ended up finishing 4th in the Premier League which is a place higher than last season but is far from where I expected to end up at the end of January with some incredible performances coming from my team. We ended up behind Man City, Chelsea and United respectively which aren’t bad opposition to be honest, but I still feel awfully disappointed considering how well we were throughout the first half of the season!

In other cups, we were knocked out of the FA Cup by QPR, who along with Norwich became our bogey team throughout the season. But WE WON the Europa Cup! It was a hard fought competition, beating competition like AC Milan, Shakhter Donetsk and Galatasaray! Very impressed with my team to accomplish this as I feel that having won this shows the board and even maybe the world that we can compete for higher European football and shows that we have improved after the previous season which is important!

The board appear to be very happy with performance and if you discount the awful results and disappointing end to our Premier League season, we actually did quite well. We won a cup for Tottenham which is apparently their first since 1978 and we’ve also managed to qualify for Champions League football next year which should bring in more TV revenue and hopefully financially secure us, paving the way for us to become a European super power!

Player Performances/Statistics

If you were to ask me who my player of the season was going to be in January, I would have said Carlos Vela without a second breath, however a poor second half to the season in which he only scored 6 more goals means he’s not so quick to the award for me. Our highest average rated player was Christian Eriksen who also won English Players’ Player of the year which is nice for him. His high rating and award was probably down to his high level of assists of which he managed 18. I love to be able to see centre attacking midfielders getting a high level of assists as I feel that means we play good possession football.

Jorginho once again had an incredible season in the centre of the park, averaging 87% pass completion, higher than any other member of the team (obviously excluding the players who played less than 5 games) which is something he’s constantly improving on which is exactly what I want to see. Jorginho also surprisingly ended up coming second in our highest scorer list with 18 goals which is very impressive for a central midfielder, this was thanks to his 100% (10/10) penalty taking record and his hard work in training on his finishing.

Memphis Depay appears to be severely declining and hasn’t been half the player he was in his first season with the club which is very disappointing. Along with that, Erik Lamela has shown no signs this half of the season of improving on his poor start, I may have to alter his position to benefit him a little more Eriksen out on the wing, we’ll see.

I have a couple of youth players I have been trying to implement into the team in the form of Nat Beeney and John Paton. Beeney is the more exciting of the two youngsters with a four yellow star potential and five black star potential. He’s a striker, who as you can see is all about his physical stats. He’s a young player who has the physical potential to be great, he just needs to work incredibly hard on his actual footballing skills as he lacks dearly in those.

Future Plans

When it comes to next season, I’m going to be looking at bringing in some youth looking toward the future. I hope to maintain my current place and assert my dominance as a top four contender in the Premier League. I have minimum expectations to get passed the group stages of the Champions League and anything further than that would be above expectations. The other competitions aren’t important to me, however if we don’t make it out of the group stages of the Champions League, I shall make the FA Cup and Premier League my top priorities.

Looking forward I can see that we need to improve upon our Left and Right backs with two weak players in Danny Rose and Kyle Walker occupying these positions currently. I’m going to look into the potential of buying some fairly young full backs (under the age of 24) who have room to grow, but are also quality enough to be brought straight into the side. Apart from that, I may look to get rid of Depay as there are rumours he’s currently worth around the £40m mark which is exiting to hear and Canales, my signing last January is struggling for games with his positions all taken up by better players.

In summary, I feel that this process is going to take a little longer than previous Football Manager saves for me. Previously I have been Manchester United (my supported team of choice) and have always managed to start buying the next young incredible talent within my second season and begin to see incredible regens developing within my fourth season. However with this Tottenham save, I can see I have a lot of work to do before I can consider taking risks by bringing in talented youth. In previous years, my teams have been famous for having an average age of 23 or something, this time round, this process could take an extra few season. But trust me, keep reading and evolving yourselves in the story and it’ll all be 100% worth the wait!