It’s been clear as a bell to the vast majority of us on this site where we’ve been headed for a very long time.
All it would have taken was that small bit of support to get us over the line at crucial times but that support was not forthcoming from our chairman.
What instead did Daniel Levy do during this period of valiant struggle? He knocked down our home. He knocked down our home and leveraging our club’s great history he spent every penny raised on erecting a megalithic retail outlet that happens to have a football pitch at its centre, or is the real centre-piece an NFL pitch, with Spurs now referred to as “anchor tenants” by ENIC staff?
And in the process of doing this Levy buried our club in staggering amounts of debt, so much debt that new words had to be invented to accurately measure it; ‘Generational debt’.
Which for Spurs supporters of a certain age means your kids subs will still be paying for this long after you’ve gone, it’s that good. All this was done, carefully planned to be done, directly at the expense of the footballing team on the pitch.
For Daniel Levy is not a footballing chairman, to be absolutely clear this is a man who measures success in zeroes and ones, not by tin pots in glass cabinets.
When Levy first floated this stadium gubbins there was lots of accompanying talk about THFC needing to be ‘more competitive’ but what people failed to understand at the time was that dear Daniel was never talking about the awfully random pursuit of winning kickball trophies, his vision of competition envisioned acquiring (or building) lots of lovely value appreciating property assets.
The rub or more accurately ‘the fun’ for young Daniel was how to do all this whilst making these assets still appear to be one thing – a football club but at the same time brilliantly hiding their true purpose – as repayment instruments for low interest generational debt.
Rather, annoyingly he was forced to recognize that the football club (for now) appeared to be the only reason the bipedal wallets wanted to engage with his THFC brand. So, how to expend the absolute minimum necessary on the pesky ‘non-retail’ pitch whilst keeping the tills ringing off it?
Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Mauricio Pochettino, the manager who made all Daniel’s dreams come true. For only sub eight figures annually, here was a man who proved he could not only save young Daniel tens of millions in disgusting transfer fees but with only buttons at his disposal could in fact exceed all expectations in non-retailing matters. The fatted cow and the golden goose rolled into one.
For Levy the ROI on Poch was staggering, by simply raising this manager’s relatively tiny salary he could save twenty times the amount and more annually on transfer fees, eventually reaching the Xanadu threshold where he was expending less than nothing on player transfers.
All he had to do was feed Pochettino a vision that slightly enhanced the importance of grass based matters, and he found that through some manner of sorcery unknown to the accountant’s high table this new manager could actually convince these brain-lets to fight and win in a manner previously unseen during ENIC’s tenure.
So this is the backdrop against which all Spurs on pitch efforts have been played out. Forget the micro nuts and bolts, this is the macro meat and potatoes.
But putting current frustrations aside. Putting current frustrations, the Summer’s frustrations, the CL final’s frustrations and the whole of last season’s frustrations aside, we do need to give this team and Poch the credit they deserve; they have for many years genuinely been trying to win something, to build something against tremendous odds.
Sadly they just had no idea who they were dealing with in Daniel Levy. Levy has undoubtedly done Poch like a kipper or should I say Poch allowed himself to be done; he never asked enough questions at the time, he never kicked up enough of a stink when it must have dawned upon him what was really going on, he just kept taking the money, wearing the suit and allowing himself to be mollified by some fireside face-time with Levy.
So yes Poch is complicit, inasmuch as he has allowed himself to be royally cucked. To be fair he just might not have been smart enough as it’s not like Levy didn’t have thousands fully and completely fooled with his ability to do ‘just enough’ to keep the lemmings from the cliff edge.
But back to the team and their efforts, before it all went so horribly wrong.
Just think how tired they must be. God they must they be tired, tired of the project, tired of hearing about the building, being the plucky underdogs and the stories of jam tomorrow, yet all the while still not being able to understand why they are not being supported in going about their primary desire.
They just had to take it on faith from El Pocho, and they did to be fair. In seasons past they gave their all, they watched as hundreds of millions of pounds were ploughed into a new stadium but nothing for the team, no home to call their own and still they soldiered away.
I’d be tired of that, regardless of how much money I was on, who wouldn’t be? Having knocked themselves out for years only to have achieved absolutely nothing tangible for all their efforts then I imagine that one by one they just stopped listening, stopped believing and now finally, stopped trying.
That’s an awful place to be for an ambitious professional. They probably can’t form enough words in the correct order to elucidate why they feel the way they do, bless them but feel it they do and having fairly primal instincts they can smell the stench of death about the place. The corpse stinking the place out is the manager and his project. What we are witnessing now is purely the funeral arrangements.
Where does that leave us supporters? Well with the knowledge that the only franchises Daniel Levy is interested in forming are ones with the NFL, by default we supporters are left completely disenfranchised – supporters of an ‘anchor tenant’ team, victim of an aggressive stealth takeover by a man who represents and partially owns a company that has somehow managed to never spend a penny of its own money in support of the thing it owns.
Daniel Levy is not a footballing chairman, never has been, never will be.
Under Levy’s stewardship and ENIC’s ownership, the paucity of investment in the football team has been breathtaking, world-class in fact, Gordon Gekko would be proud.