[NEW] Conte appreciates scale of his task in building winning mentality at Spurs | appreciates – NATAVIGUIDES

Antonio Conte started with an apology. The Tottenham manager was an hour late for his unveiling on Friday and he wanted his Zoom guests to know that it was because a video analysis session had overrun.

“I’m sorry,” Conte said, steely-eyed and stony-faced. But he wasn’t, really, because his new club is in a mess, he has joined mid-season, with no proper run at instilling his philosophy, and the time is ridiculously tight.

It is rare that a new manager has his presentation to the media after his first game, Conte having arrived on Tuesday to succeed Nuno Espírito Santo, waited for his work permit until Thursday morning and gone straight into the Europa Conference League home tie against Vitesse that night. After Sunday’s Premier League match at Everton, he will lose the bulk of his squad to international duty.

And so every meeting counts, every training-ground drill, every minute of work. Because if there was one thing that leapt out from Conte’s opening address to the media, it was that there is so much to fix.

“We need to work a lot to try to improve this team,” Conte said. “There are many, many aspects – not only tactically but also physically. It’s for every single player. This squad has to work to improve their physical condition to go into my idea of football; to have more order on the pitch and to not be so emotional during the game; to improve their capacity also to suffer.”

Tactical, physical and mental. It felt like the full bingo card. Conte has seen enough already to indicate that the players do not possess sufficient fitness levels to produce the non-stop running that is a non-negotiable part of his approach.

“I know my parameters and I know that I want to have a type of football that is aggressive and intensive,” he said. “To do this, you need to stay in good physical condition otherwise you can follow this plane for 20 to 30 minutes and then you go down.”

The Vitesse game also shone a light on the skittishness of the collective mentality. Three-nil up after 28 minutes, Spurs turned a stroll into a stress, conceding twice before half-time, then having Cristian Romero sent off on the hour. Conte’s team did hang on to win 3-2 after Vitesse had two men dismissed in the closing stages but for many long-time Spurs observers it underlined a problem that has been obvious for a while – that Tottenham’s biggest barrier to success has been psychological.

Harry Kane has made a slow start to the season and Antonio Conte will be looking for an improvement from the England forward.

Photograph: Sebastian Frej/MB Media/Getty Images

“For sure, this aspect we have to work [on], to improve,” Conte said. “It’s not easy because you have to work every day and you have to breathe a winning mentality every day. And you don’t invent this. It’s impossible to pay [for]. I think you have to take the right people, to bring this into the club.

“You have to start every day with this type of mentality. You have to start to think about football for many hours of your life to improve results. To think: ‘OK, I want to win but I know that it means sacrifice, it means to suffer, it means to work very hard.’ If you start to think in this way, it means that you want to become a winner. Otherwise you continue to stay at your medium level.”

Conte drew a clear distinction between the level of the club’s facilities and that which they have shown on the field. At one point he described the stadium and training ground as “fantastic, great … maybe too much”. Did he mean there had been too much emphasis and investment on the facilities at the expense of the playing squad?

“You must have vision,” Conte said. “This club had a great vision outside of the pitch. Now we have to start to have a vision also on the pitch, on the football topic. This is important if we want to win. On the pitch, we need to change many, many things.”

With time, Conte believes he can get there, he feels he can turn the players into winners, into ruthless killers. Back to the issue of time. “We don’t have much,” Conte said. “This is my only worry, that we don’t have much time to work and reach the level that we need now. I don’t like to tell you, ‘Slowly, slowly’, but I need to go slowly.”

Conte has only a 20-month contract, albeit with the option to extend, but he does not appear worried by this. “It’s not a problem; we decided and I understood also the sacrifices this club did for me,” Conte said, with a nod perhaps towards his £15m salary or the robust backroom staff that he has been permitted to assemble.

Conte has been boosted by support from Harry Kane, who said he was excited to work under him, describing the move to bring in the former Chelsea manager as showing “great ambition|”. And so what is Conte’s realistic target?

“In the Premier League, there is a gap with at least four teams,” Conte said. “At the moment, honestly, I can’t tell you that this team is ready to fight for the title. But this situation must be an incentive for us to work harder, to start to think that we have to be competitive and then to fight for the title. I always work very hard to reach the target and enjoy with the club a title. At the same time, we have to know the reality.”

What Is Currency Appreciation?

Currency appreciation is an increase in the value of one currency in relation to another currency. Currencies appreciate against each other for a variety of reasons, including government policy, interest rates, trade balances, and business cycles.

Key Takeaways

• Currency appreciation refers to the increase in value of one currency relative to another in the forex markets.
• The value of a currency is not measured in absolute terms. It is always measured relative to the currency being measured against it.
• Countries use currency appreciation as a strategic tool to boost their economic prospects.

Basics of Currency Appreciation

In a floating rate exchange system, the value of a currency constantly changes based on supply and demand in the forex market. The fluctuation in values allows traders and firms to increase or decrease their holdings and profit off them.

Currency appreciation, however, is different from the increase in value for securities. Currencies are traded in pairs. Thus, a currency appreciates when the value of one goes up in comparison to the other. This is unlike a stock whose appreciation in price is based on the market’s assessment of its intrinsic value. Typically, a forex trader trades a currency pair in the hopes of currency appreciation of the base currency against the counter currency.

Appreciation is directly linked to demand. If the value appreciates (or goes up), demand for the currency also rises. In contrast, if a currency depreciates, it loses value against the currency against which it is being traded.

Understanding Currency Appreciation

A standard currency quote lists two currencies as a rate. For example, USD/JPY = 104.08. The first of the two currencies (USD) is the base currency and represents a single unit, or the number 1 in the case of a fraction such as 1/104.08. The second is the quoted currency and is represented by the rate as the amount of that currency needed to equal one unit of the base currency. The way this quote reads is: One U.S. dollar buys 104.08 units of Japanese yen.

For the purposes of currency appreciation, the rate directly corresponds to the base currency. If the rate increases to 110, then one U.S. dollar now buys 110 units of Japanese yen and thus appreciates. As a rule of thumb, the increase or decrease of a rate always corresponds to the appreciation/depreciation of the base currency, and the inverse corresponds to the quoted currency.

Appreciation of Currencies vs. Stocks

A stock is a security that represents ownership in a corporation for which its officers have a fiduciary duty to conduct operations that result in positive earnings for the shareholder. Thus, an investment in a stock should always be appreciating in value.

By contrast, a currency represents the economy of a country, and a currency rate is quoted by pairing two countries together and calculating an exchange rate of one currency relative to the other. Consequently, the underlying economic factors of the representative countries have an effect on that rate.

An economy experiencing growth results in a currency appreciating, and the exchange rate adjusts accordingly. The country with the weakening economy may experience currency depreciation, which also has an effect on the exchange rate.

Effects of Currency Appreciation

When a nation’s currency appreciates, it can have a number of different effects on the economy. Here are just a couple:

• Export costs rise:  If the U.S. dollar appreciates, foreigners will find American goods more expensive because they have to spend more for those goods in USD. That means that with the higher price, the number of U.S. goods being exported will likely drop. This eventually leads to a reduction in gross domestic product (GDP), which is definitely not a benefit.
• Cheaper imports: If American goods become more expensive on the foreign market, foreign goods, or imports, will become cheaper in the U.S. The length to which $1 will stretch will go further, meaning you can buy more goods imported from abroad. That translates to a benefit of lower prices, leading to lower overall inflation.

Currency rates are thus subject to the ebb and flow, or appreciation and depreciation, that correspond with the economic and business cycles of the underlying economies and are driven by market forces.

Image by Sabrina Jiang © Investopedia 2020 

Real-World Example of Currency Appreciation

China’s ascension onto the world stage as a major economic power has corresponded with price swings in the exchange rate for the yuan, its currency. Beginning in 1981, the currency rose steadily against the dollar until 1996, when it plateaued at a value of 1 dollar equaling 8.28 yuan until 2005.

The dollar remained relatively strong during this period. It meant cheaper manufacturing costs and labor for American companies, who migrated to the country in droves. It also meant that American goods were competitive on the world stage as well as the United States due to their cheap labor and manufacturing costs. In 2005, however, China’s yuan reversed course and appreciated 33% in value against the dollar until last year.