Firstly, let’s get the Coronavirus business out of the way. As a dramatic form of crisis, it was one that affected businesses that weren’t deemed essential without fear or favour. What grates, however, is just how exposed you as our CEO, left the business.
This is as good a juncture to make your apologists squirm to be reminding everyone that SARS insurance absolutely was a product freely available, Wimbledon took an option, and yet THFC whose long-standing commercial partner is the South East Asian and global insurance giant AIA, and you did not avail.
The debt arising which is the result of a program you embarked upon, is eye-watering, but the true worry here is that no other football business on Earth has pursued a route as extreme as your choice. I appreciate that pioneers by their very nature need to go first, this initiative has left us in a position that is not just embarrassing, but one that now potentially threatens the very existence of the football club.
Whilst this may come as a slight shock to you, but some of us are wholly disinterested in your Haringey edition of Monopoly and have our eyes firmly fixed upon the football club. It could have escaped your attention in the cut thrust of realizing your commercial dreams, but your core clients are football fans. Our preferred sport of choice is football, and we love Spurs. Everything else comes second, third and fourth. This is not to demean or insult anyone, because most folks at Cheltenham are there for the racing, and at F1 meets, to watch the cars fizz around.
My point here, is are you still making good decisions on behalf of the business? You were hell-bent on hiring the serial winner coach José Mourinho, and yet it would appear that you also knew better than he when it came to the mechanics of the squad.
So here we are once, more in the playground of the broken-hearted. Up to our ears in debt, no vague hope of trophies, no coach, no transfer funds, and surrounded by an ageing, and a fundamentally unsuccessful bunch of players most of whom have failed to deliver now for 3 managers on the bounce. Ah, ah, ah… tangible success to normal folk Mr. Levy is winning silverware. We are primarily football fans, not spreadsheet aficionados.
The squad is as some assessed some time ago, too mentally and too physically weak to do any good in footballing terms. Once again, for clarity, I am not talking about how anyone feels, I am purely discussing the metrics used in professional sports on this planet.
Unless I’m missing something, there’s no money for a squad rebuild unless we can sell in a deflated market (which is always inadvisable), and judging upon your price point for the last game of the season, the plan is to brazen this out at the full price, simply hoping to get across the line somehow.
As you consider your position, let me reinforce just how bad things are for you at this precise moment. I’ve been a massive critic of yours for some time, but I’m actually against the current #ENICOUT nonsense because as thuggish as you and your minions might have sought to paint me, I realized that all my evidencing of the daft things you were doing hadn’t done enough to prick the consciousness of the masses. In fact, by the time the European Super League blew up in your face – despite it being too late to meaningfully challenge you – the mob had apparently reached a tipping point, and so now you’ve now got fans using #LevyOut on social media like it’s some sort of template. That’s how bad things are, little old me has been superseded by …an angry mob!
A cynic would look at the debt, the size of the task in getting the squad into something a good coach might be able to use and think that you’d placed all your casino chips on the ESL to get you out of schtook.
Is it time to move on and take the questionable decisions with you, time for some football people – with a head for business to come in – and salvage this drifting wreck? When does the lifeboat arrive?
