Daniel Levy is a monster for furloughing 550 of Tottenham’s non-playing staff this week while he continues to pocket a multi-million dollar salary.
He deserves every pelter being thrown his way – and there are plenty.
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But he could have been saved from this PR disaster by the other big earners at the club, namely the players among whom there is a leadership casm.
We know Levy is a thrifty scoundrel who would take any measure to protect the financial security of the club, and I’d be astounded if that didn’t include approaching the players to negotiate a wage suspension that may have allowed a more empathetic decision to be taken on non-playing staff.
He cannot enforce that. The leadership has to come from the players, as it has at Barcelona and Juventus where Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo have pulled their pals in line to prop up the little guys, as BBC Sport details.
What this tells me is that there is nobody strong or respected enough within the Spurs dressing room to influence this movement among the players.
And that is more of a concern to me than Levy’s penny-pinching. Because when all this is over, that lack of leadership will be exposed on the pitch, again, as it was a bunch of times before the season came to a halt.
Right now players should take cut. If they never got paid again they are comfy. Pay the staff. If i had Lewis & Levys money instead of penny pinching i would be in a meeting asap planning how to dominate at home & winning in Europe too. Sadly im not
The players are only employees of a highly profitable company who are conveniently being thrown to the dogs, football is not the only industry with overpaid people that are just as capable of offering support, financial or otherwise to this crisis . As for football I should like to think that, maybe when normality returns, it will learn from this desperately sad affair and reconstruct the way the profligate finances are distributed. Instead of having a few fat cats, clubs at all professional levels receive a piece of the cake , that would include the pay structure of everyone involved in the game, so that clubs at all professional levels can support themselves to a point . The current situation means many clubs are bordering on going out of existence with no income coming in, whilst those fat cats will suffer temporarily, they will survive. However many lesser clubs could disappear, that cannot be right, so something has to change for the better of all concerned, that’s my twopence worth anyway.
Story on the Guardian saying Burnley could lose fifty million if the season is not completed and they have to hand back the TV money. Interestingly they also said they will lose £5 million from match day income. Assuming they have four or five home matches left from the remaining nine games that seems to be a rather large income for a club of Burnley’s size, at least a million pounds a game. I’m not sure what that figure represents, it must include season ticket revenue and gate receipts, or maybe I’m missing something, that’s a lot of Bovril and meat pies.
Liverpool the latest club to furlough staff, now Spurs,Newcastle,Bournemouth and Norwich.
I’m not sure, but might have something to do with the size of the companies, Spurs had 550 staff, and after recording record profits some people thought they could afford to pay the staff for at least two months. The fact that the owner is worth over four billion pounds and has seemingly done nothing to help is not a good look. Also when football returns the huge money from the Sky/BT football deals will start pouring in immediately. The airline industry could take years to recover, with people not able or wanting to fly. Airlines could go into bankruptcy but I think not one Premier League club will.
British Airways furlough 30,000 staff to save redundancies? Why aren’t their owners being ridiculed and treated the same as football.
The club captain Hugo Lloris needs to take command on behalf of the players maybe with Harry Kane who is probably the most influential player. Players live in an insulated bubble, remember the infamous story of Phil Neville not knowing how to make a cup of coffee. The players must be feeling the heat, one thing they must not do is take any advice from Gordon Taylor of the PFA, anyone who follows football will know why I say this. Unfortunately to win back some favour with the public and help Tottenham’s reputation which has been squandered by the chairman the players need to take a bigger cut than thirty percent. They also must insist some of the money goes to the NHS workers and others in need, and non playing club staff and not straight into Levy and Lewis’s pockets. I have always opposed Lloris being club captain for football reasons, now when he seems to have nothing to offer I suggest he steps down. Harry Kane is the person who can salvage something from the fiasco. The club itself is doing some good things, but it needs to do more.