Spaniard faces his old team in Europe next week.
Ex-Tottenham Hotspur head coach Juande Ramos has heavily criticised the north London club’s transfer policy, as well as labelling some of his former players at White Hart Lane as “fat”, according to exclusive reports in the Daily Mail.
The Spaniard is now in charge of Russian outfit Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk, who take on Tottenham in the Uefa Europa League next week.
And ahead of that meeting, Ramos has spoken out about his 12 months in the Spurs hot seat, with the 59-year-old saying that the north Londoners’ chairman Daniel Levy was only interested in making money in the transfer market, and as a result, the club will never win the Premier League with such a strategy.
“City sign Jesus Navas, Alvaro Negredo. They don’t look at the age of the player, they look at the performances. Spurs look at the age, thinking of a future sale.
“I advised them to sign Luka Modric. He spent a couple of years developing and started performing well and they sold him.
“Why aren’t Spurs going to win the league? Because they are always a small step below those three or four teams. Economically it works well but in sporting terms it needs a slight tuning. What are you chasing? Titles or economic success?
“Then you don’t sack the manager for not always being in the top four. I didn’t have a problem with selling [Dimitar] Berbatov, so long as someone came in to replace him.
“The two strikers that I asked for were Samuel Eto’o and David Villa. But we were left with Darren Bent and Roman Pavlyuchenko.”
And Ramos was also highly critical of the type of food that his players ate during his time at the Lane, saying: “It was incredible. It was like a wedding buffet. Cakes, pastries, sauces. Honestly, and I say this with no bitterness at all, there were players who were… well, fat. They were sedantary.
“In a sportsman the physical condition has to be perfect because you live off your body. Your food is your fuel. If I eat a cake, I’m putting in diesel; an athlete needs to be putting in super fuel. There was some resistance of course — a lad who is 22, 23 years old, with cash in his pocket thinking, ‘And this guy’s coming here telling me what to eat.’
“We trained out in Chigwell and there is a McDonald’s and we would see them there, eating hamburgers and drinking Coca-Cola.
“I couldn’t go to their houses to see what they were eating but if they were not at their ideal weight then I could keep them out of the side. And we recovered in the league, we beat Arsenal for the first time in (nine) years and we won the Carling Cup, all in four months. Everyone’s as happy as hell.”