In hindsight, it's pretty easy to hyper-analyse a football club's transfer activity, the ins and outs, the rights and wrongs, but after Daniel Levy appointed Ange Postecoglou as Tottenham Hotspur manager last June, it was clear that there was a new, focused vision.
And it was a good thing too, with Spurs fighting for success in the Premier League once again after missing out on continental qualification entirely; further issues might have been detrimental, with the likes of Aston Villa, Newcastle United, West Ham United and Brighton & Hove Albion all equipped to fight against the established 'big six'.
And with these aspiring outfits fighting tooth and nail to knock the Premier League scales off-kilter, Postecoglou's early workings down at N17 hardly received the momentum boost needed when club record scorer Harry Kane decided that he'd done his duty and completed a transfer to Bayern Munich.
Still, the recruitment strategy since Postecoglou's arrival has been a far cry from the misfiring, rueful approach that has precluded silver-laden success for over 15 years.
The Spurs ace who went from outscoring Bale to the "flop of the season"
This Tottenham dud is at the epicentre of a chequered transfer history.
ByAngus Sinclair Mar 5, 2024
Sure, Tottenham have enjoyed some sublime talents over the years but too many have fallen flat or slipped away.
Keeping hold of Kane and unleashing him at the spearhead for the best part of a decade, while it didn't bring silverware, is without question one of Tottenham's biggest success stories of recent history, the Three Lions skipper cemented as a Premier League great.
Harry Kane's Spurs career
Kane might have left Tottenham without any major honours, but he's cemented his name in the club's history books and is undoubtedly one of the Premier League's finest-ever goalscorers, behind only Alan Shearer in the scoring charts and with a superior rate of scoring.
1.
Alan Shearer
260
0.59
2.
Harry Kane
213
0.67
3.
Wayne Rooney
208
0.42
4.
Andy Cole
187
0.45
5.
Sergio Aguero
184
0.67
After an itinerant opening to his professional career as he leapt from loan spell to loan spell, Kane eventually earned an opportunity in the closing stages of the 2013/14 Premier League season and announced himself with three goals and two assists from six matches at the end of the year.
The rest is history and all that; everyone knows of Kane's prowess as an elite centre-forward and he completed his Tottenham career as the club's record scorer, with a healthy haul of 278 goals and 64 assists across 430 fixtures, praised as a "supreme professional" by The Times' Henry Winter.
Having now made the move to Germany, Bayern Munich might be enduring a torrid domestic season but Kane has been typically imperious in his striking quality, posting 33 goals and eight assists from 33 outings thus far.
As mentioned, he is undoubtedly Tottenham's shining star of modern history, possibly the greatest player in the club's modern history, and keeping hold of him for all those years was truly momentous work from Levy and co.
Interestingly, as everyone knows, Kane was plucked from Arsenal in his formative years, with former academy coach Roy Massey revealing to talkSPORT that Kane "didn't have" what it took to rise through the Hale End ranks at the time.
A staggering mistake but a forgivable one in the circumstances; it would quite literally require impeccable prophetic thinking to ensure that every aspiring hopeful avoids the dreaded release.
And, while Tottenham can revel in that victory, they failed to convince Kane's fellow England international several years later, with Bukayo Saka – who is now valued at £90m by Football Transfers – rejecting the north London club as a boy in favour of the Emirates Stadium.
Why Bukayo Saka chose Arsenal over Spurs
Back in 2022, the man himself revealed that Arsenal's London rivals Chelsea and Tottenham had pursued his signature as a youth before he emerged as one of the Premier League's standout stars.
Speaking to Sky Sports, he said: "I remember one session, and I don’t think I went to another one. But, yeah, I think it was just to go and try different clubs but we always had Arsenal in our hearts.
"There was Arsenal, Chelsea I was at for a bit, there was Watford, there was Tottenham. I think there was maybe two more but those are the ones that I can remember from the top of my head.
"Arsenal was the one I always wanted to go to. It seemed like they had a lot of faith in their youth and there was a clear pathway.
"You could see the players coming up from Hale End to London Colney, and my dad also really believed in the project and he loved Arsene Wenger a lot."
Arsenal are riding the crest of a wave at the moment, and that crest is golden. A stunning run of form in the Premier League has kept Mikel Arteta's side apace with indomitable champions Manchester City and resurgent table-toppers Liverpool.
Declan Rice has been the general in the engine room, William Saliba the rock at the back. Saka, though, is a prodigious attacking force capable of unlocking the sturdiest of defences with his pace and energy and invention.
As per FBref, the 22-year-old ranks among the top 11% of attacking midfielders and wingers across Europe's top five leagues over the past year for goals scored, assists and shot-creating actions, the top 16% for progressive carries and the top 7% for tackles per 90.
Regarding the current campaign, just the 16 goals and 15 assists across all competitions with nearly three months of action still to go, averaging 2.5 key passes, 4.8 ball recoveries and 5.9 successful duels per game in the Premier League, as per Sofascore.
One of the best in the world? It's been a matter for debate over the past several years but Saka is still so young and, as Arsene Wenger recently said, he is not unequivocally "world-class" – it would be a brave objector to call that one into question after his recent emphatic exploits.
There's no question that Saka would be the star of the show at Tottenham and would blend superbly with Heung-min Son on the alternate flank, offering a more versatile and creative style to the prolificness of the South Korean.
And indeed, extracting his impact and influence from Arsneal clutches over the past several years and placing it at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium would have only served to swing the stones of power in Spurs' favour, perhaps providing a foundation for illustrious heights that certainly have not been recently.
