A cramped old English ground that is looking dated. A club who are at last trying to recapture the glory nights of a bygone era. A team who, having initially looked starstruck, are growing bolder with every step they take on the European stage. It would not take Jonathan Woodgate and Robbie Keane to spot the links between Tottenham Hotspur’s Champions League crusade and that of a Leeds United side who reached the semi-finals ten years ago.
The big difference with Tottenham, who have a Champions League quarter-final place within their grasp after beating AC Milan 1-0 in the round-of-16 first leg at San Siro, is that they have not gambled with their future.
Whereas failure to qualify for the next season’s competition sent Leeds hurtling towards a financial oblivion from which they have only recently begun to emerge, Tottenham have shied away from gambling at the table that says “Champions League or bust”.
Tottenham’s expenditure on transfers and wages has risen as Harry Redknapp has made his mark on the squad over the past two years or so, but their fortunes have risen far higher. Their latest financial accounts, for the year ending June 2010, show a wage bill of £65 million, which, as well as representing a relatively conservative 57 per cent of their turnover (pre-Champions League), was less than half of that at Manchester City, who finished one place behind them in the Barclays Premier League last season, at least £45 million less than Liverpool’s and nearly £15 million less than Aston Villa’s.
There was further investment for this season with the acquisitions of Rafael van der Vaart, Steven Pienaar and William Gallas, but it has not been wild. Failing to qualify for next season’s competition would bring challenges, but only in terms of persuading players such as Luka Modric, Gareth Bale and Van der Vaart, who have excelled on the Champions League stage this season, to ignore rival interest and settle down for a crack at the far less illustrious Europa League.
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It is a sad fact of modern football that finishing in the top four of the Premier League is seen as more worthy of celebration than reaching the last four of the Champions League.
Qualification for the latter — and indeed promotion to the former — is often seen as an end in itself, rather than a means to an end.
For Leeds in 2000-01, the extent of their financial folly meant that living the dream and chasing the Champions League should have given way to pursuing qualification for the next season’s competition, but Tottenham are not in a position in which their existence hinges on staying among Europe’s elite.
In financial terms, beating Chelsea and Manchester City to a top-four finish in the Barclays Premier League may be worth more, but people forget just how lucrative a long Champions League run can be. Living the dream, as Peter Ridsdale, the former Leeds chairman, infamously called it, should actually be about winning.