There’s an article making the rounds on social media today from FourFourTwo that makes a pretty big claim — Tottenham have “begun talks” with Crystal Palace manager Oliver Glasner in the event that the club decides to cut ties with Ange Postecoglou at some point, whether that be after dropping out of the Europa League playoff or at the end of the season.
That’s interesting! We’ve seen Spurs linked with managers such as Bournemouth’s Andoni Iraola, Fulham’s Marco Silva, Brentford’s Thomas Frank, and even Ipswich Town’s Kieran McKenna. But Glasner? That’s a new, and intriguing, addition to the list of possibilities.
But is it really? If you’ve read this blog for any length of time or followed our coverage of past transfer windows, you’ll know that one of my big soap boxes is insisting that Carty Free readers be critical thinkers and consumers of transfer rumors and discourse. That starts with not running with every half-baked rumor that emerges from the worst of the rumor aggregators on X, but also to be discerning with media sources.
So let’s look at that FourFourTwo article. Scroll alllllllllll the way to near the bottom, and you get this sentence:
German outlet SportBild report via Sport Witness that Oliver Glasner is wanted the North Londoners, amid interest in the Crystal Palace boss from RB Leipzig.
Oh, so this isn’t a FourFourTwo exclusive after all! Dig a little bit and you’ll find the SportWitness piece, which is itself a summary and partial translation of a SportBILD article that’s locked behind a paywall.
And this is important — the BILD article (which you can’t read without a subscription) isn’t really about Tottenham Hotspur at all! It’s mostly about RB Leipzig’s managerial search, and how Glasner is potentially an option along with Danny Röhl for the Leipzig job. Tottenham, however, is briefly mentioned by BILD. Again, from the SportWitness piece:
This week’s edition of SportBild‘s magazine says Glasner remains a candidate and then states Tottenham ‘can offer a higher salary’ and therefore beat RB Leipzig to the Crystal Palace manager. The German media may want to dismiss Tottenham being more attractive as being solely down to money, but that probably isn’t the case given the previous reports from Austria.
Interesting. So representatives Tottenham may or may not have made contact with Glasner, and the feeling out of Germany is that if they’re serious about him, they’d be able to offer a better wage that Leipzig. But there’s a lot of heavy lifting in that excerpt, right? And what about those “previous reports from Austria?” No mention of what those are either. But that’s a whole separate dig.
Let’s set aside for now whether we think Glasner would be a good fit for Tottenham after Ange, which isn’t really the point here. None of this is to say that Tottenham Hotspur aren’t putting out feelers for new managers. I think they absolutely are and would be smart to do so. Glasner might even be on their list of potential Postecoglou replacements; that wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest. And at some level the fact that we’re being linked with managers and they aren’t running in terror at the idea of managing Tottenham Hotspur feels pretty good!
What we end up with is FourFourTwo aggregating a SportWitness translation of a paywalled BILD article that is really about RB Leipzig and not about Spurs at all. This is extremely thin gruel with which to end up with a headline that reads “Tottenham begin talks with Oliver Glasner.”
I want to be clear here — this article is not intended to call out any of the sources listed above. I don’t have an axe to grind against FourFourTwo, SportWitness (which provides a valuable service in translating foreign language and paywalled sports reports), or BILD (which is basically the German Daily Mail). The game, as Avon Barksdale said, is the game. Hell, I’m an aggregator myself and I’ve 100% spread rumors that turned out to be complete bullshit, merely because I determined that the rumor, while perhaps untrue, could at least be plausible, only to find out I was dead wrong. It happens!
And this is definitely me being tautological in my own discourse, but it’s important — my goal is to make Carty Free readers the most intelligent and discerning Spurs fans on the internet. The truth, or at least the nugget of an idea that percolates through Bat Country, is frequently buried beneath layers of aggregation and linked sources. So don’t believe everything you read! Dig for original sources! Dive deep down the rabbit hole and examine everything you see closely — is it true? Is it plausible? Should you embrace a rumor because you want to believe it, or should you wait for more info?
Transfer rumors are fun. I love them! They’re our bread and butter here. But as we careen to another silly season that could be impacted by [waves hands vaguely] EVENTS, it becomes more and more important to be discerning in what we read, and what we believe.
