In Levyworld – a distorted, dystopian, solipsistic unamusement park reality – Tottenham Hotspur is a club on a comparable level with those four sides. A ‘big club’. One of the elite. And it remains apparently impossible to disabuse him of this fanciful notion, all evidence to the contrary. The things that confirm status among the rarefied air of the truly big clubs are not the physical assets like stadia or training grounds, and they are not balance sheets or shareholder value.
Big club status is defined by on-field success. By trophies. Big clubs actually win things. Spurs fans – and indeed the club’s rich history – demand a trophy. Daniel, in yet another misinterpretation, has instead brought atrophy. In the twenty years of ENIC’s control, Tottenham Hotspur has mustered just one solitary League Cup victory, and that was over thirteen years ago. It is the club’s single longest trophy-less run since 1950.
This trophy record is far worse than Lord Sugar’s tenure in Tottenham’s ‘difficult’ 90s period – the Chairman who was quite open about his general lack of emotional investment in the on-field side and about seeing the club purely as a business venture, as opposed to Daniel’s ardent claims of footballing ambition. And it’s far worse than Irving Scholar’s stewardship throughout the 1980s until 1991, a period during which the club continually teetered on the brink of financial implosion, unlike the (pre-COVID) Tottenham Hotspur plc of world record profits. Daniel’s measure of Revenue per Trophy – presumably, along with Net Transfer Spend, one of ENIC’s business KPIs – must be unmatched among the elite clubs (and deluded elite pretenders) across Europe.
Silverware is the only true indicator of ambition and accomplishment in football. Levy’s hollow dissembling might attempt to suggest that the Premier League, and the English game as a whole, are more competitive than the situation in other countries and that trophies are harder to come by here. This argument does not, however, stand up to too much scrutiny. By the end of last season, almost 120 trophies had been won by former Tottenham players since Spurs last won any major silverware in 2008.
In the intervening years, it’s not merely the other members of the so-called ‘Big Six’ – each of whom has done so several times – who have been able to deposit a little more silver in their trophy cabinet. Leicester City, as a fine example of a genuinely well-run club rather than a chaotic mess, has obviously been rightly lauded for bringing home both the Premier League title and the FA Cup, but other such giants and luminaries of the British game as Birmingham City, Swansea City, Portsmouth, and Wigan Athletic have also managed to bring their supporters a memory of triumphant joy. Spurs have barely been at the races.
Let us put all pretensions aside for a moment. Spurs are not a big club in any meaningful sense. When all the furore around the European Super League was raging, contrary to popular belief, the majority of the rage from Spurs fans from whom I have heard was not about the elitism or the unfairness of it all, or the dismantling of 150 years of the football pyramid. I mean, we definitely didn’t like that side of it, but if it was going to happen (and let’s not for a moment pretend it still won’t), we’d rather be on the inside looking out.
With the notable exception of the egocentric self-help group of ENIC apologists, the Tottenham Hotspur Supporters Trust, who seem predominantly to have been upset that Daniel didn’t ask them first, the primary complaint about it all has been that it felt wholly undeserved. That Daniel Levy had simply declared us a big club without putting in the hard yards to warrant that status. Aspiration without the willingness to strive for attainment. Compare the past twenty years of trophies for Tottenham with the other eleven founding members. Even Arsenal. It won’t make easy reading. We’re simply not in the same league, even if, technically, we are.
I am of the opinion that Levy has his own individual logic with regard to the squad ability, he believes they are good enough to achieve success, and it’s the managers that have failed.
Success being CL qualifiers which is the only criteria for him and the board, and reaching the CL final only strengthened that belief, however the truth is somewhat different.
And then it was 1.3 billion? Determined to enhance their assets and property portfolio; not quite so determined to have a genuinely successful team out on the pitch!
Freemason! Yes, um
Quite!
These managers, of course, just don’t want Levy’s cheap, bargain basement (and often still not good value even) signings!
What is the point, though, of having a magnificent stadium if the team that plays in it is hopeless? It’s simply embarrassing to have such a gulf between facilities and playing standards, rather like Queens Park playing at Hampden, except that there are good footballing reasons for that, historically, the Glasgow club being the original aristocrats of the game up there.
I happen to think the stadium was a bit more than double; I seem to recall that in 2016 it was 400 million and MY thinking “that’s likely to be around 700 million then”
🙂
and that’s not a plea to let Ryan run loose
Freemason
Levy kicked Mace off of the internal fit out and appointed his own contractors , causing massive delays , go figure as to the the 120 % Increase in costs
Great post.
Levy is both out of touch and out of his depth when it comes from to football.
However, when it cones to making excuses and patronising the fans with them, he really does take some beating.
Blaming a manager for not ‘wanting’ signings is outrageous. We all know that Poch didn’t want more mid priced dross from Ligue 1 just to fill the squad out. What sort of players were you offering him Daniel? If they had been his actual targets or had the required quality, of course he would have wanted them.
Its this idea that he thinks he can pull the wool over the fan’s eyes that I find particularly disrespectful. He clearly doesn’t credit the fans with having anything between their ears whatsoever.
He’s a pillock who thinks he knows best, well, look at the state of things now. He doesn’t…
In terms of the General Conditions of Contract for project management , any project that exceeds 15% of its total initial value is a failure and was not planned for correctly ,once the 15% in variation orders are achieved ,the contractor then is allowed to renegotiate the total value of the contract…the stadium was almost double ? I dont know how the budget was exceeded by so much unless there was major issues with regard to structural integrity that the project needed redesign mid through work being done. This also matches with the way Daniel Levy runs the football club,absolute wanker
I think all Spurs fans share the same frustration when it comes to Daniel Levy. I have complained about him endlessly on this blog and in my personally opinion i think the positives and negatives of having him as a chairman are very simple to analyze.
Financially he is no mug and we can be very proud of both the stadium and the training ground. It’s definitely a tick for DL but we need to move on from it. It’s used in his defence every time he is criticised and nobody is beyond criticism regardless of their past achievements.
He’s known to be a tough negotiator and whilst that may have saved money in the past on wages or transfer fees i feel that long term this approach has been detrimental for the club. There are clubs that simply refuse to do business with us and now we are searching for a new manager this approach will not work with modern managers who know they need to earn the maximum over a short period of time.
This leads to my next point, recruitment. Specifically managerial/coaching appointments. You could argue that Levy has only got this right once in 20 years with Poch. If you remember at the time Louis Van Gaal was our first choice but he decided on Utd. The only manager he got right wasn’t his first choice.
I’m not going to dig too deeply into player recruitment as I’m sure there are scouts or experts he uses or has used during the 20 years. He’s not fully at fault on this point but I now believe the buy young & cheap and sell high approach is not the model we need going forward, especially in our new stadium.
To summarise, i think we can all agree that Levy’s skills are best suited to the club’s infrastructure. He does have a proven track record (not without costly mistakes) of getting projects finished. I know we can point out things that went wrong but i think it is fair to give him this credit.
However, from a football point of view his track record is appalling. One cup in 20 years, manager less and comfortably sitting at the top of the laughing stock table. If had a £1 for every Spurs meme I’ve seen in the last year i could buy Harry Kane for my 5 a side team.
For our club to move forward the solution is simple, DL has to relinquish all control of footballing matters. All control.
Kind words Sir!
Can you guess what the f….. stands for?
I just realized I forgot to put mother between bald headed and f…..!
A depressingly accurate picture of the wee bald headed f—–, MS.
Actually, it would be fairly typical of my timing!
Yes, he blew it for us! “The Theatre of Failure” Very apt, Harry. The trouble with the “long term interests” is that it appears to be so long term that any genuine success – if it ever comes – is likely to be beyond my lifespan and that of quite a few others on this website. I’m so pleased Spurs are possibly going to be a power in the land when I’m six feet under!
Post is good, but yours MS, better. Really gets to the crux of the problem. Levy is the same as too many of the players, after all he can get and just like them glorying in it.
I’ll grab it! 👊
Great post, well written.
I have reproduced my post of yesterday to explain why I think Levy doesn’t care.
https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/cec35ec4dec125da36e430963eed0fc5?s=64&d=retro&r=pg
Marbella Spur
19 hours ago
I should think Levy laughs uncontrollably more than we all think. After all, he has spent over twenty years deceiving the Spurs fan base for his own benefit. He is and has been for some time the highest or second highest paid CEO in the PL. He was paid a £2 mill bonus for going 100% over budget on the new stadium and being one year late in delivery. He charges the fans the highest ticket prices in the PL and probably not far off the world, allied to the highest food and beverage prices just to rinse the fans a little bit further .During his tenure which as we all know has yielded one League Cup, he has not put one penny into the club whilst enriching himself at the expense of the club’s football success. Not only that, if one values the club at approximately £2 billion before debt, his 30% shareholding in Enic is worth £300 million and it hasn’t cost him a penny except failure in all footballing matters which conversely is the only thing that matters to the fans. Let us not forget to mention the cost to the club of all the redundancy payments the club has had to pay out over the years due to the chairman’s poor judgement in filling management, DoFs, coaching, analytical and scouting staff positions. Then of course there is the reputational damage to the club perpetrated by Levy which includes his attempt to furlough the staff and to charge ST holders for the new stadium, even in the knowledge that it wasn’t going to be ready in time and that we had another year at Wembley. Levy has also managed to make himself the most disliked CEO in PL and European football. Apart from his singular lack of self awareness which is assisted by having the hide of a rhino, does he really care? He’s been getting away with this deception for over twenty years and most of us have been either too stupid or too supine to realise it and too lazy to do anything about it. Levy can continue to laugh uncontrollably at our expense whilst we continue to weep.