This isn’t an explosive blockbuster of a blog primarily in order to preserve anonymity; but hopefully still provides some insight.
The company involved play a significant part in the New Destination despite the apparent size of the contract the owner was pretty sallow about matters.
I was told that Levy himself and other were extremely personable and that the Club itself gives a good first impression.
This was then directly countered with a rather blunt confession that, given the opportunity to repeat the whole process, it would be politely declined and a tender would never have been submitted
Which was somewhat of a Django Unchained moment.
We are talking about a contract value that looks like a telephone number.
The issues are not complex.
Sure they are if you drill down into the minutia of endless diarised events, et al whilst describing how to conducted business in quicksand.
It became very evident, very quickly, that this poor person sounded an awful lot like they had tried to sell Spurs a footballer.
The Levyologists were incredibly quick in absolving Levy from all responsibility with the catch all excuse of, ‘all big projects overrun’.
We’ve dismissed this cobblers on numerous occasions.
Yes projects overrun, but not typically by what is essentially 40% of the anticipated time frame.
Nor do projects typically cost several hundred million more than estimated.
Nor do projects blow their contingency monies so fast – or was the decision to dilute the Nike deal and then mortgage it to the banks to raise more cash a just a coincidence that it occurred when the project was months past its opening date?
The contractor told me that initial discussions went well and all appeared well.
However there then began an endless cycle of going over the same aspects, again and again and again.
The tedium really set in as every item discussed then (in the mind of the club) had direct impact upon the ongoing discount/overall cost.
The contractor guessed it was a ‘divide and conquer’ tactic, reassessing the overall cost after every component part was added, but assured me that this didn’t effect the final pricing, it just demoralised everyone at the company.
I was told it was quite common for clients to be ‘new’ to numerous aspects of projects, but the swagger (for want of a less offensive word) displayed was bewildering.
This was further compounded by the involvement of equally unqualified ‘relatives’.
Whilst senior contacts at the club remained constant, on a day to day basis it was a revolving door of faces, organised chaos.
This contractor’s staff had never seen a working environment like it.
I was told it felt very much as if all the problems the project had encountered were self inflicted due to straightforward incompetence.
