That's a fair guide but not necessarily the whole story. If they spent -relatively - big in the close season, they might have been favourites. The real point I'm making though is that there's no-one on NSC who knows the answer, but TB probably does, or at any rate, employs someone who can tell him.
If nothing else, he is exactly the kind of candidate you might expect Tony B to uncover ahead of knee-jerk names like Redknapp. I don't know where the market expected his Israeli side to finish last time out, but I bet TB does, and also that they exceeded expectations by quite some way.