Football Season Guide

Tottenham are enduring yet another summer in which off-pitch issues are taking precedence over purely footballing matters and it does not bide well for their upcoming season. Spurs yet again narrowly missed out on Champions League football after just slowing down a bit in the final few weeks of the previous season and allowing Arsenal to just about nick the fourth place off their hands. It was a harrowing and agonising miss but the overall positivity around the place has been maintained as a result of some genuinely good football developed under the watch of Andre Villas-Boas. The Portuguese is keen to build something long-lasting at Spurs and that is why he rejected the chance to become a manager of PSG in the summer. He will now want his team to improve all over the pitch and become a side that scores more goals and turns more of their overall dominance into points. Yet, that seemingly good start of the summer is fading fast into memory after the oh-so predictable Gareth Bale soap opera has kicked into gear. The Welshman was by far the most devastating and unstoppable player in the league last season and the sole reason Tottenham kept getting results when they had no fit striker in the squad. He undoubtedly made himself indispensable for Spurs and for a while it looked like he will be staying on for at least one more season. However, the stakes changes when Real Madrid pressed home their long-standing interest and really started to talk about getting Bale this summer. This naturally unsettled Bale who has not played in the recent pre-season friendlies, inventing all sorts of mysterious injuries. Tottenham remain adamant that they will only sell for a mind-blowing fee which smashes the world record. While they may not get their wish, there is a feeling that Bale is beyond the point of return in terms of playing for Tottenham again and the team's crown jewel will get his wish before the end of August. All that overshadowed the fact that Tottenham signed some very good players in the summer and definitely boast a better squad at the moment. Paulinho is a fine driving midfielder that offer physique and technique at the same time. Roberto Soldado is a predatory and proven striker that is a genuine upgrade on the current two strikers on the books. Nacer Chadli and Etienne Capoue arrive more as squad players but are very good players as well. Thus, even with Bale likely to leave, the ingredients are there for Spurs to have another season actively involved in the battle for Champions League football. They may just miss out again though and will need to be more effective and hold their nerve better during the business end of the campaign.