Good evening where you are.
The real question is, where is Tottenham Hotspur Football Club tonight?
To the untrained eye, Spurs are taking their usual approach to another transfer window.
Where the myriad mistakes of windows past meet ‘Levy-time!’, whereupon our illustrious chairman swoops in with just minutes to spare before Jim White enjoys the final death throes of his deadline day la petite mort.
To those of us with more seasoned vision though, our spinning eyeballs see a football club that’s been financially optimising and fine tuning it’s PR capacitors while buying bit part players from what is effectively petty cash.
We’ve had the flipping’ Queen and Phil the Greek flying into the Fatherland in a private jet with a Spurs’ wrap on it.
We’ve had Emperor Franz Beckenbauer holding up the beloved Lilywhite, ably assisted by Ozzie & Mabsy. All three wonderful footballing greats are stood next to an Audi with Tottenham branding and the Audi Cup itself.
A competition that THFC masterfully, nay incredulously, managed to elbow their way into.
We’ve had social media redemption from our two most notorious sinners.
Adebayor has laid bare the cobblers convoluted mess that appears to be his private life.
Call me Daniel also took to Facebook (with Mauricio) to conduct one of the most heavily rigged Q&A’s since Vlad the Impaler asked his chief pole maker if he was happy in his work.
Franco Baldini is a man credited with having been spent an eyewatering amount of money on players that had great CVs; but bar two memorable London derbies, failed to produce anything that could be confused with anything vaguely confusable with coherent football.
Tim Sherwood and his now ‘iconic’ Premier League win percentage were both tossed aside, faster than a low income Haringey family in N17’s social cleansing programme.
In an age of businesses having cultures and body languages and other such rarified attributes, some wide boy with unfettered access to The Lane’s hallowed corridors emitting one liners that would make Sid James and Bernard Bresswlaw cringe, was a big no no.
Binned.
The ship is steadied, the brass polished and brochure put in the hands of the world’s most fabulous travel agents.
Our problem, brothers and sisters, is that for all the misplaced ‘Levy-time’ bravado, the rather grim reality is that instead of Horatio Nelson, we’ve had Captain Pugwash at the helm.
Proof of the pudding came just yesterday.
Levy may be able to run rings around your run of the mill intellectually sub-par muck that infests the Premier League, but when it comes to dealing with the incredibly astute top tier of American sporting magnates …he’s patently not fit for purpose.
Dealing with any business successfully requires an understanding of …who you are trying to talk to.
To simplify this into the curious dialect of footballees, …perhaps think of Ray Wilkins being drafted into Aston Villa. Forget skill-sets, Tim’s charm-sets are on a par with a bailiff who’s overdosing on Viagra.
I digress.
It seems that call me Daniel simply isn’t able to cut the mustard with the big boys.
For all the occasional Levy apologists out there, when you ask the fanbase support for THFC’s current owners is flatlining.
75% of supporters want a change of chairman. That was the vote, folks!
The working environment inside the club has been described having reached a level said to be, “even more secretive, duplicitous, disruptive, toxic and paranoid than usual”.
Four supporters groups got in touch with this blog to share their lack of confidence of Daniel Levy.
I didn’t court that opinion. They came to me.
Levy’s overall approval rating by the fans slip on one site to around 14%. Which is probably not wholly dissimilar to Joseph Stalin’s just before things went mammary glands up for another man who was staunchly adverse to public opinion.
This dreadful blog which commands the biggest audience – by a country mile – of any Tottenham media outlets – has been deleted from the THFC official newsfeed from NewsNow.
This is alone tells you all you need to know about the current regime.
They do not want to encounter anyone asking tough questions, because they are simply unable to cope.
They might have taste! But they are unwilling to genuinely engage with supporters.
This soul destroying quote emerged yesterday:
As far as the NFL goes, these complex, delicate and important negotiations were very close to completion when we tried to add a couple of last minute items. Bafflingly, those conditions wouldn’t have been a drop in the ocean to the overall financial size of the deal, but unfortunately the shenanigans left a ‘bad taste’ in the mouths of the NFL negotiating team.
We realised we were being penny-wise pound-foolish and have done our best to smoothe any ruffled feathers so we’re left with a couple of sticking points, which are being actively worked on.
This smacks too much of the petty and deal blowing pedantic behaviour that has dogged the seeming last life sentence of the club’s ownership regime.
And here’s the sucker punch, again from our friends at COYS:
According to both **** and *******, this is spot on, especially as two other London entities have more recently contacted the NFL about this opportunity.
Not only has Levy has risked all, but this time for particularly cheap personal gain.
Historically, Levy has not just overseen but permeated an entire business culture with a creed of saving on Post It Note expenditure has being seen as a triumph.
Winning one singular trophy in a 14 year period deemed by apologists as ‘over performing’.
Ouch.
The update is that there is hope. Something Spurs fans have learned over the decades to see as an open door policy to disappointment.
From COYS again:
We’re back on track! Light at the end of the tunnel. Both sides working hard to bridge the remaining gaps.”
I bet they are.
Pray to whomever gives you comfort and some semblance of peace in your life that a fire was lit beneath under Pugwashes’ poonanny.
One of DL’s worst faults is his misguided belief that time is somehow his asset. That Levy-time is where he uses lack of time to manipulate his opposition into doing what he seeks.
This has always been largely based upon the dictum that if he doesn’t spend anything, if a deal falls apart, then he has retained not only ultimate control, but more vitally, the money.
It’s this cockeyed approach that has kept the books neatly balanced and the playing staff a disjointed mess of nearly men and born to failers.
This deal with the NFL isn’t about screwing the best deal he can out of some chumps, this NFL deal is about making the deal happen so that something pretty magical can happen for everyone concerned.
This language would terrify DL. His immediate assumption or interpretation of this goal would be that he would have to make valid concessions.
To successfully negotiate, you must be prepared to make concessions that actually mean something, failure to do so actually points towards you simply making demands. Now you might be terribly polite in your manner, but a demand is a demand.
The particular businessmen that DL is dealing with here are far more experienced and far more successful than he will ever be; as I mentioned above, when faced with the Barry Frys of this world, DL barely has to change gear in order to achieve his aims.
I won’t be as crude to say that DL is out of his depth here, but if he doesn’t get his act together and swiftly, these guys will thank him for coming and walk.
Time is not on Levy’s side, returning to a large ditch where a stadium should be, a team that probably won’t get relegated and a support that’s become disenchanted to the point of angry with the inertia is not a win.
He won’t be coming home to admire his intact empire.
He’ll be owning the title deeds to a big, steaming, mercilessly hungover turd.
Worse still, he knows in his heart of hearts, time is actually against him. StubHub was a PR disaster, the THST has been totally discredited and the banal world of turfies and players occasionally mumbling about ‘pushing on for Europe’ is a busted flush.
His days are over. Ironically, the only Europe he can delivery is the slow decay of an additional half a season of crappy games that only serve to fatigue and demoralise players and fans alike.
This is the last act in the opera. This is the fianl aria. This is the long good goodbye.
Get off the stage Daniel, we need to sweep up. Your suit pockets are close to tearing with the sheer weight of money you’re getting from this deal. You’ll be the richest man in in the cemetery.
After this hopefully soon to be averted fiasco, we can look forward to an exciting new chapter at THFC.
Oh, and we can kill any talk of an ENIC legacy.
