I would hope Ahmed appreciates that the Bostock transfer was both legal and not particularly unsporting, even if the end result of a fantastic young talent leaving the team who developed him while he’s still so young isn’t really how we’d like to see things go in football. I’ve no doubt if Bostock had stayed at Palace for another season or two, he would have continued to play regularly, come on in leaps and bounds, and then promptly been snapped up by one of the top 4.

However, Spurs offering him a contract rather than dealing with Jordan wasn’t ‘unsporting’, but rather more pragmatic. If we’d spoken with Palace instead, they would have offered Bostock a new contract which he would’ve had to accept, negotiate or reject, with no idea of what we were offering. That would’ve put a lot of pressure on the lad, which everyone involved wanted to avoid. As it was, we offered him a contract, which he liked the look of and accepted. Then we offered Jordan a sizeable wedge (but still not enough, in mine and Jordan’s opinion) which he rejected in favour of settling with the tribunal, which bizarrely valued Bostock even less. All the big4 do business in a similar way, signing up promising youngsters to play in the reserves. Often they make offers for youngsters who are out of contract, and often tribunals settle the fee. Arsenal do it all the time. Its perfectly legitimate, and even if its how we’d like to see football going (myself included), that’s the way it is, and that’s how the top4 generally manage to assemble world-class squads without paying world-bank transfer fees like the so-called Galacticos.

So Spurs weren’t really unsporting at all, and its a bit silly that Bostock’s being dragged into all this hypocritical name-calling and finger-pointing. I understand where you were coming from, Ahmed, but its just the nature of the Premier League beast.

I won’t go into the Jol/Ramos saga, suffice to say that I think the other Spurs fans on here have successfully proven we did nothing wrong, and everyone else (and some Spurs fans) have rightly pointed out it was a shambolic train-wreck, the blushes from which still haven’t quite faded.

Keane and Berba, the crux of the matter… Well, Robbie submitted a transfer request to the effect that he wanted to talk with Liverpool. After signing, Rafa apologised and gave us a donation on top of our already massively inflated transfer fee, so there must have been some wrong doing. Fact of the matter is, had Rafa not declared interest, Robbie would’ve been happy with us. That’s not tapping up though, so maybe Robbie was given a hypothetical contract offer in secret, or maybe Rafa was just being sympathetic (not likely).

Either way, at the end of the day, we got a large fee for a decent player who’s performed above expectations for us for the last three or four seasons. He isn’t, however, a world class striker. There’s no doubt he’s a talented lad, and when he’s on his game he can be astonishingly good, but at every club he’s played at his form has been patchy (although it got better in the last two years, he still had some months when he couldn’t hit a barn door).

I’d like to say I hope at Liverpool he can find the consistency he’s struggled to find elsewhere, but I don’t really, because it’s dog eat dog in the PL and last thing I want to see is Keano getting a golden boot this season and winning Liverpool the league. All the same, I think calling him a Judas is a bit much. This was no Sol Campbell episode – we got a lot of money for Robbie, and he was very gracious about the club he had worked tirelessly for for a long time.

I created a little thought experiment to deal with the transfer. It might help other Spurs fans who, like myself, feel a bit bitter about Robbie asking to leave:

1) You’re a decent footballer, playing for a decent PL team.
Let’s say it’s Villa.
You’ve been there 6 seasons but only got European football for two of them, never in the CL.
You’re 28. You’re peaking.
It’s all downhill from here.
Maybe Villa might get to the CL sometime in the next 2 or 3 seasons, its all a bit sketchy.

2) Spurs, the team you’ve supported all your life, declare an interest in signing you.
They’ve been playing in the CL regularly, hell they’ve even won it recently.
They sound like they’re really keen on you; they’ve put in a bid way more than you’d value yourself, and way more than Villa could really ask for you.
This is probably your one and only chance to play for your boyhood team – if you don’t go now, they’ll probably sign someone younger and give up on you.
Remember, you’re 28.
Also, it looks like you’d fit into their squad nicely – they’re shipping out some players who you would otherwise have to compete with for selection.
Oh, and they’re offering you a lot more money than Villa’s wage structure would allow.

If any Spurs fans think they would turn down Spurs and stay with Villa in that situation, they’re either not really Spurs fans, or deceiving themselves. I’d jump in a second – and be sorry to leave Villa, but delighted to join the team I’ve always supported.

This isn’t a terrible betrayal, its the realisation of a boyhood dream, and I feel glad for Robbie that he’s getting this chance, even if I feel gutted for Spurs, and annoyed at the board for not having sorted this out sooner. When Ramos took over, I said I hoped he’d sort the squad out before this season starts. He may yet do that, but we’re cutting things a bit fine, and ultimately we’ll have the same old excuse “new players need time to gel” to rationalise bad performances, if there are any (oh god I hope not, but let’s be realistic here).

As for Berbatov, I grow tired of the issue. I don’t care whether he stays or goes (I’d like him to stay, but if he doesn’t want to work harder to win stuff with us, then I don’t want him) but I do object to United fans arguing we should just hand him over for whatever they want to pay.

There’s a lot of factors involved here – firstly, he’s under contract and he’s a key player for us, but just as importantly is the fact he’d make a huge difference for United: he’s not a van Nistelroy-type player, he’s not going to bag 40-odd goals a season, but with his touch, his ability to drop the ball on a penny, combined with United’s mouthwatering attacking midfield, he’ll create as many if not more. Hansen said (and I loathe to quote the Scotch muppet, but he’s right) last January: “Bottom line, if he goes to United, they win the Champion’s League.” Well, they won it anyway, fair enough. But with an addition like Berba, United would struggle not to win the league and CL for the next three or four seasons. Plus the impact of a player like that on your youngsters is immeasurable. United already have a wealth of talented players inspiring their youngsters, so that’s perhaps not such a factor for them, but I dare say Berba would only have a positive influence on established younger players like Rooney, Tevez (if he stays), Nani, Anderson etc.

So I think if you Reds want him, fair enough, but don’t whine about the fee we set, otherwise you’re no better than that Madrid lot.

And anyone who takes Levy’s complaints at face value, and not as the wily (but unscrupulous) business they really are, is a bit dim. We don’t seriously want to keep an unhappy Berbatov at Spurs and have Fergie’s wrists slapped – we just want as much money as we can get for our prized asset.

As a last word on the subject, if I were Ramos, and I had as much sway over transfers as he supposedly does (after all this Spurs fan talk of how its going to be better with Ramos because the board trust him with money more than they did Jol), I would tell Levy not to sell to United, whatever they offer (listen to bids but not accept – don’t reject, just stall) and take a lesser fee to sell him to Barca. We don’t really need the money, and we certainly don’t need to see our star player helping United to a clean sweep this season. Better to see him playing in Spain. Then we can be pleased when he works his magic, and helps knock the top4 out of the CL on the way to lifting the trophy, rather than seeing him playing at one of our direct competitors…

Well, I can dream. The reality is Levy will be after as much as he can get, and assuming Fergie can persuade the Glazers to put in enough money (money which isn’t theirs anyway, its the club’s), we’ll bite their hands off to sell.

I’d also like to point out the absurdity of United fans commenting on our financial situation. You mortgaged your club for over a decade to a bunch of Yank idiots with no money. They will take billions of your profits to pay off their own debts. You make plenty enough for it not to be a serious issue (except having ever-so-slightly tighter purse-strings in the transfer market), but still, take the log out of your own eye before you start telling us about the speck in ours.

And finally (honest) the question of who is and isn’t good enough to break into the top 4 is absurd. At the moment, the gulf in winnings between EC and CL qualification is so enormous, that the top 4 are a monopoly. We (and a few other teams) could conceivably break into 4th place at some point, but it would be foolish and naive to believe it would be sustainable – Liverpool, or Arsenal (or one of the other two, if they were ever to muck up so badly) would simply spend a bit of money buying some more strength for their squad and walk back into the top 4 the next season.

There really ought to be a fairer way of distributing winnings among the whole league. Like results-based winnings – if you won away at the team who finished top, you get maybe 2% of the prize money, whereas if you beat the team who finished bottom at home, you only get 0.1%. I obviously haven’t worked the numbers out, so don’t quibble with that. The point is with that sort of system, the smaller clubs could still get a decent lump of cash to help them develop, if they managed to pull of a giant killing. This would make the league a lot more competitive, from start to finish.

Right, sorry for the length of that, but having digested everything everyone has said on here, there was a lot to address. Hopefully no one can possibly disagree with anything I’ve said, but that seems unlikely on recent form. I’ll try to keep checking back here over the next few days in case anyone does reply, but since its already quite an old article, I might meet with silence. Either way, thanks to Ahmed, and all the fans here, for a genuinely entertaining (if not always entirely rational) debate.

No. Spurs are not a small club, there are no small clubs in the EPL (except maybe Stoke and Hull, no offense) but Man U and Liverpool compete for Europes top prize year in and year out and both are almost expected to reach the last 4 each year so they are a level above.

Unfortunately I didn’t get to see the explosion before it was deleted!!