Even the Premier League’s top four find their best players wanted by other European clubs - and if you’re anyone else, you can only hope that your players won’t want to challenge for major honours elsewhere.

That’s the problem facing Juande Ramos and Spurs with Liverpool interested in Robbie Keane, a number of clubs after Darren Bent, and champions Manchester United wanting to sign Dimitar Berbatov this summer.

The problem Spurs have is that despite all their investment in recent years and talk of breaking the top four, they’ve only come close in 2005/2006, with their only major trophy this decade coming in the form of last season’s Carling Cup. It’s more silverware than many other Premier League clubs have won in recent years, but when you’re finishing quite far off winning the league, it has to put doubts in players’ minds.

As we’ve seen over the years, and particularly this year with the Cristiano Ronaldo transfer saga, players aren’t as loyal as they once were. Neither are they happy to stay at a club, even when life is going well.

Keane has been at Spurs since 2002 but can count just last season’s Carling Cup among his club honours, which is clearly not enough for a player who wants to play in the Champions League and challenge for the league title. There’s only so much patience a player can have, but not everyone is happy at just picking up a seven-figure annual salary, and you can’t blame him or any of the other strikers in wanting to leave White Hart Lane.

There is certainly promise at Spurs, and the club’s directors are definitely ambitious, but you could say every club in the Premier League is ambitious, but that doesn’t mean you’ll get success.

Bulgarian Berbatov has been one of the most consistent players wherever he’s played, scoring an average of a goal every two games, and it’s only right that a player of his calibre is being linked with moves to Manchester United and other clubs in Europe who can give him Champions League football and more of a chance of winning the league.

Out of the current strikers at White Hart Lane, Bent is the one most likely to stay. He’s not made any noise about leaving, and he has something to prove. He’s not worth anything near the £16.5million Martin Jol paid for him, and has so far failed to justify why the Dutchman paid £6m more for him than he did for Berbatov. That’s a lot of money to pay for a bit-part striker.

Peter Crouch went to Portsmouth for just £9m while Jermain Defoe left Spurs for Portsmouth for around the same price. When he joined Spurs, Bent did say the club was heading in the right direction ad he wanted to be a part of that – time will tell if Ramos wants him to be a part of his revolution.

Berbatov, meanwhile, has only been in north London for two years and has a Champions League runners-up medal from his days at Bayer Leverkusen and will be desperate to go one better. Spurs paid just over £10million for him and if Ramos receives a bid of more than double the amount the club paid, he will be tempted to accept it and put the funds towards rebuilding the side with players he feels will do the job for him.

Jol made the mistake of rotating his strikers but getting paid thousands a week to sit on the bench is not enough for the modern Premier League striker. They rightfully want to play every game. It's not a policy everyone likes and is always going to upset at least one player.

The only thing guaranteed to keep players happy at any club is playing regularly, playing well and winning trophies, and maybe Ramos can improve on last season with what he’s got now. Anything other than a top-six league finish will in my mind be a disappointment, after this summer’s investment. The Spaniard has bought some of the most sought-after players in Europe so far, and it’s a huge signal that he wants to kick on and really make a go at breaking the top four and winning the UEFA Cup en route to Spurs reaching the big-money heights of Champions League football.

If Berbatov and Keane don’t leave this summer, I can see them walking away in January or at the end of the season, if Tottenham again fail to make progress the players expect.

And that will leave Ramos with more rebuilding to do and the Spurs dream further away from reality.