Daniel Philip Levy, the man who bravely spearheaded the delivery of arguably the finest combination of stadium and training facilities in all of European club football, and who diligently secured a regular place from the outset in the most prestigious elite club competition (currently on temporary hiatus rather than permanent cancellation), must find it utterly inexplicable that the fans of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club seem so curiously and infuriatingly bereft of gratitude for his endeavours. After all, as he has told us repeatedly, “everything we do is in the long-term interests of the club”.
A few weeks ago, in his programme notes at the end of the season, he spoke of ambition.
“I have always been and will continue to be ambitious for our club and its fans”
he said. More recently, in addressing Harry Kane’s concerns at the club’s apparent lack of success in terms of trophies, he stated “All I will say is his frustrations in not winning are shared by me and all the fans and players. We all want to win.” And herein lies the crux of the issue. It’s a question of definition and interpretation.
If one clicks open Dictionary.com and looks up the definition of ‘Ambition’, it describes it as “an earnest desire for some type of achievement or distinction, as power, honor, fame, or wealth, and the willingness to strive for its attainment”. I genuinely have no reason whatsoever to doubt Daniel’s desire for achievement or distinction (although perhaps it might be tempered by thoughts of managing fan expectations in the longer-term) and he’s allegedly, by his own words, as frustrated as our itchy-footed number 10 when that achievement fails to materialize. I suspect, however, that he might have confused ‘ambition’ with ‘aspiration’, which is simply defined as “a strong desire, longing, or aim” or “a goal or objective that is strongly desired”.
The keen-eyed reader will have spotted that the willingness to strive for its attainment is notably absent from that second definition.
Daniel may well aspire towards success, and in that vein has emblazoned “the game is about glory” all over the Theatre of Failure. And yet it seems as though the carefully-constructed plan for attaining that status consists largely of waiting for it to fall into his lap. His consistent failure to fully back managers throughout his tenure certainly supports this
One of the more incredulous aspects of this is that at several points it almost did fall into his lap. Destiny has on a number of occasions left Spurs on the cusp of success, only for Daniel’s own shortcomings to snatch mediocrity from the jaws of adequacy. Amidst his scattergun approach to managers – an approach that aimlessly lurched from club playing legends to petulant Frenchmen to affable Dutch journeymen to dour Spaniards to Cockney wheeler-dealers to stubborn Portuguese to unqualified, self-appointed club legends to player’s friend Argentinians with a history of smaller clubs to potentially outdated serial winners – there were fleeting moments when, in spite of himself, Daniel might have had greatness very much thrust upon him.
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Martin Jol took Spurs to the brink of Champions League qualification while constantly running on a rug-pulling treadmill of his best players being continually sold from under him.
Mauricio Pochettino somehow marshalled a shallow squad to regular Top 4 finishes and an EPL Runners-Up position, despite a lack of ongoing investment. He wanted the likes of Zaha and Grealish, along with a back-up striker of some sort, but was instead fed on the gruel of Njie and Nkoudou, leading to a kind of Stockholm syndrome, where the manager (a job-title he suggested ought to be changed due to his lack of control over transfers) was made to feel grateful for the likes of Moussa Sissoko.
Harry Redknapp took Tottenham into what appeared to be a three-way title race in December 2011 and requested that Daniel sign Carlos Tevez and Gary Cahill in January simply to allow the club to push on. He was instead forced to make-do-and-mend with Louis Saha and Ryan Nelsen, and the title challenge inevitably wilted away to nothingness.
This psychological abuse of the manager culminated in a form of football gaslighting when Tottenham’s becoming the first club in Europe’s top five leagues to sign no players in two consecutive transfer windows was disingenuously attributed to the manager not wanting to sign the players offered to him. In spite of this failure to strengthen at all, even when the club had more players taking part in the last four of the 2018 World Cup than any other club in world football, Pochettino somehow dragged Tottenham to a Champions League final where he was forced to play a still-injured Harry Kane due to a lack of viable options. That summer, however, all the talk of Paulo Dybala proved to be just that, and Tottenham once more entered the next season without cover for Kane, a decision which ultimately cost them, dear.
And, most recently, though comparatively a mere fleeting cameo in the Daniel Levy Show, during Jose Mourinho’s stint in the not-so-hot-seat he managed to push the club at one stage to first place in the Premier League in spite of itself, and later to a cup final, but was nevertheless also thwarted by the club’s unfit-for-purpose transfer policy and directorial micro-management. He was handed players he would not have chosen, prevented from shipping out some of the deadwood that still infects the squad today with the toxic stench of apathy, and his stated goal of improving the defence was hugely undermined with the only centre back addition being another of Tottenham’s perennial ‘ones for the future’ in the form of Joe Rodon (who I am sure will ultimately turn out to be a very astute buy, but… well,… let’s just say there’s a recurring theme of ‘jam tomorrow’ where Daniel is concerned).
There’s been no more success with Directors of Football than there was with managers. Frank Arnesen quickly realised he’d be better supported at Chelsea and headed for the hills. Damien Comolli was uninspiring but undermined. And when Paul Mitchell dared to challenge Daniel’s world-view and his coterie of yes-men, he was shown short shrift and placed on gardening leave that lasted for only slightly less time than the second ice age.
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Even now, with our brand new, shiny DoF yet to even get his feet under the table, there are already rumoured ‘differences of opinion’, with the Director of Scapegoatery favouring a more defensive coach, while Pennywise the Clown is set firm on a candidate with a more free-flowing approach and who would develop the club’s younger players and academy prospects.
I’ll admit to being sceptical about the veracity of these rumours, if only because they imply that Levy has any clear strategy whatsoever regarding an incoming coach – a stance that flies in the face of all evidence from the last two months. If they’re true, however, and this is indeed the kind of candidate he’s truly pursuing, then wasn’t the appointment of Paratici himself woefully misjudged? If you’re hoping for pulsating, attacking football then a director synonymous with the past twenty years of Italian football – where a clean sheet has remained the most highly-lauded achievement – seems a counterintuitive choice, doesn’t it? And if you’re hoping to develop youth, why turn to the man whose most celebrated acquisitions are a 32-year old Andrea Pirlo and a 33-year old Cristiano Ronaldo rather than, for example, a Luis Campos or a Ralf Rangnick? I mean, you wouldn’t… would you?!
Despite two decades in charge, however – the longest stewardship in the Premier League – Daniel’s footballing insight remains blighted by myopia. His perpetual false economy of buy-cheap-buy-twice has seen the likes of Luis Suarez, Bruno Fernandes, Wilfred Zaha and Paolo Dybala passed over while the likes of Vlad Chiriches, Federico Fazio and Clinton Njie have come and gone in short order, and then been replaced by even more wild stabs in the transfer dark. In 2018, Levy reportedly found himself with the chance of signing Jack Grealish for £6m, but in his petty, small-minded, Dickensian fervor, he tried to haggle Aston Villa down to £4m, providing time for a takeover of cash-strapped Villa to be completed and the chance to sign a player now valued, even in this COVID-weakened market, at £100m, was gone forever. There was at least a sense of brutal honesty in the infamous “Carlos Kickaball” comments from our previous Chairman, Lord Sugar, in his derision of mercenary footballers. There was none of the pretence or even self-delusion that would try to suggest that Gedson Fernandes was a genuine bargain and the answer to all our questions.
Somehow, though, Daniel retains a sort of strange, unwarranted mystique as some kind of zen master of the transfer window. You sense this misplaced acclaim owes more than a small amount to that one happy miracle of a deadline day when Rafael Van der Vaart descended like one of the cherubim his namesake might have painted with mere hours to go, leaving Daniel with no time left to shoot himself in the foot.
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Otherwise, he remains blissfully incompetent. Beyond his aforementioned penny-pinching ethos – a philosophy that seems to be summed up as ‘Why to buy expensive quality when you can hoover up cheap mediocrity with gay abandon?’ – there is the endless haggling and the relentless, ridiculous urge to play chicken with the closing transfer window. Occasionally this ‘strategy’ – if you can really call it that – does manage to shave a couple of millions off the price of an incoming player, or add a couple to an outgoing one, but more often than not it means that Spurs fail to secure their primary targets, go into seasons without cover in key areas, or are left hanging onto deadwood players that know the club wanted them gone. And Spurs’ procession of unfortunate head coaches and managers always – ALWAYS – find themselves unable to adequately plan for the coming season, and that they’re unable to get maximum value out of the Chairman’s outlay on new arrivals because the players had no pre-season in which to familiarize themselves with either the manager’s tactics or their teammates.
This is not how real transfer experts operate. Those who know how to operate football clubs effectively and professionally get their business done early. They secure the targets they want, act before their competitors are ready to engage, and ensure their coaching staff are able to plan and prepare fully for the upcoming season.
Yet despite all of these manifold failings, Daniel shows no sign of changing either his own methods (and genuinely supporting his coaches) or the choking atmosphere of failure within the club. We’ve already seen how prospective coaches, such as Conte and Fonseca have been told to rein back the coaching retinue they bring with them, undermining them and diluting their effectiveness from the outset, because Daniel insists that the likes of Ledley King and Ryan Mason must remain part of the fabric of the club and its coaching team. I have nothing against King and Mason. They’re both held in great affection by the Spurs faithful, and the club is in their blood. Unfortunately, however, the blood type at Tottenham has been O-dear Negative for the longest time, and there is not even a hint of winning mentality amid the all-pervading culture of mediocrity.
Yet King and Mason each represent to Levy a convenient mouthpiece. A fan-friendly face on a compliant yes-man that will never rock the boat and will happily trot out the company line of vanilla banalities and baseless optimism to deflect attention away from directorial inadequacies. In a press conference shortly before the end of last season, amongst all the usual ENIC generic, oblique, puppeted, autocued fluff about world-class stadia and training facilities, Mason veered briefly off-script and came out with an unintentionally ironic and damning line about Manchester City being…
…five years ahead of Tottenham.
As a snapshot, devoid of context, the statement might seem at least partially credible. With a wider perspective, however, it would only be true were the world of football to be transplanted into Martin Amis’ book Time’s Arrow, in which the flow of time operates in reverse.
In May 2016, exactly five years prior to Mason’s seemingly innocent observation, Tottenham Hotspur finished the Premier League season above all of Manchester City, Manchester United, Chelsea and Liverpool, the four teams who this season ultimately finished in the Champions League places. On its current trajectory, Spurs should be relegated by 2026.
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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.
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Nevertheless, in spite of the continued paucity of success, Daniel Levy’s word remains indisputably law within the heavily-mortgaged halls of the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. Paul Mitchell’s ejection was not the only time in which a failure to tow the company line has prematurely ended someone’s time at the club. Even Pochettino – supposedly beloved by Daniel – found his employment rapidly curtailed after infamously suggesting the need for a “painful rebuild”. Levy’s reign bears all the hallmarks of a sociopathic control freak.
He embarks on ill-conceived plans without trusting any of his subordinates or sub-contractors to be sufficiently competent to deliver them without his hawk-like oversight, then stubbornly sticks to those plans in the face of widespread criticism and finally, when on the brink of disaster, either finds a convenient scapegoat to blame for the troubles and begins the viscous (i.e. thick, sticky and slow-moving) cycle once more, or panics and throws anything and everything at the problem, seemingly at random, in utter desperation.
The current unedifying debacle of a managerial search has demonstrated once again the depths of ineptitude to which ENIC can sink and the way in which the external perception of Tottenham differs from that of Daniel’s rose-tinted beholder’s eye. Nagelsmann got a better offer, as did Flick. Rogers preferred to stay at a professionally-run club. Likewise Ten Hag. And Lopetegui. Presumably also Rangnick. Allegri was too genuinely elite to even enter the debate. Conte, who admitted he likes a challenge, listened to what was said and decided that all of Daniel’s protestations of ambition were wanting of substance. As a job then it seems to be less holy grail and more poisoned chalice for the top tier of coaches in world football, which has almost certainly left Daniel bewildered once more.
But the search went on. Fonseca was ill-treated, whether or not he has the experience to warrant the post. Klinsmann was ignored. Gattuso, who has since apparently described Spurs to Lorenzo Insigne as ‘a bit of a mess’, was courted without even the most cursory examination of the controversy he has left in his wake or of his more defensive style of football. Potter has sat politely waiting on the sidelines throughout, his name scratched in and out of Levy’s dance card so often it must resemble a cell wall in Papillon. Martinez is much the same, though he at least has something better to be getting on with in the meantime.
And throughout the entire extended, embarrassing and pathetic process Levy has managed to convince every credible contender – current or future – that they don’t ever want to touch the job with a barge pole, even if they previously might have considered. It’s an anti-recruitment drive.
Two and a half months have passed since Jose Mourinho was unceremoniously ousted from his post mere days before the final in which he might have fared better and done the one thing he was recruited for. Two and a half months of shambolic fiasco and still no replacement appointed. Reports surfaced in the last week that Daniel is apparently angry that news is leaking from the club and it is that which is unfairly making the club look ridiculous. Sometimes though, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck…
Finally however we do at least seem to be closing in on a preferred candidate, albeit one that is not popular amongst the fans. Levy’s words to the supporters – this time that they were searching for a free-flowing, attacking coach – have once more proven to be nothing more than placatory double-talk. Nuno Espirito Santo is not that man in any meaningful interpretation, but then as we’ve established, Daniel has genuine trouble with definitions. Regardless of his somewhat reticent, workman-like football, the man whose name means ‘holy spirit’ looks likely to be handed a contract by the spectre at the feast.
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His attacking shortcomings and lack of any tangible trophy-winning pedigree, however, are ultimately going to be secondary in Daniel’s mind to the two key criteria he does possess. Nuno is a) unemployed, so should be inexpensive to recruit, and b) unlikely to have high expectations of the club.
Cheap is good for Daniel. ‘To Dare is to Do’ has been replaced as the club’s motto by ‘Too Dear It Won’t Do’ throughout ENIC’s ownership. Peering through crocodile tears, he has continually pled poverty when it comes to competing in monetary terms with legitimately ambitious clubs. Once again, however, his defence does not bear close examination. Daniel is not living in penury, unless Penury is an affluent village in Hertfordshire. You can’t claim you’re stony broke when you’ve declared world record profits on multiple occasions in the past five years, or when you’re one of only two English clubs whose finances qualified it for the special government low-interest loan for support during the pandemic. It doesn’t wash. Nobody’s buying it.
Daniel Levy and ENIC have no real interest in striving to attain genuine footballing success. It’s all about shareholder value and dividends. And that’s fine, if that’s their model. They own the club, and can choose to run it how they want. Just please don’t try to claim it’s a can’t when everyone knows it’s really a won’t. At least Mike Ashley doesn’t even pretend to care.
Let’s just indulge Daniel’s imagined unmatched hardships for a second though. If Tottenham really are so troubled financially, why is that? Could it be because ENIC’s continued under-investment has led to absence from the Champions League and the significant riches that come from that? Or is it that – in his desperate, egomaniacal pursuit of NFL revenue – Levy placed the club into generational levels of debt in delivering the new stadium, and that he did so without adequately protecting that apparently oh-so-critical ticket revenue from loss as a result of the pandemic. It was obviously unexpected, but if we were to be that reliant on stadium revenue to maintain liquidity, shouldn’t all bases have been covered?
The All England Club covered themselves against pandemic losses, and their facilities have been around for a lot longer and cost a lot less. Furthermore, the stadium project – which overran considerably due to poor management – was delivered at a time when global TV, advertising and merchandise payments had reached a point where the majority of EPL clubs were able to remain profitable without revenue at the turnstiles or the ticket office. AFC Bournemouth, as an extreme example, may not have had the most robust finances when they were in the Premier League, primarily because their global outreach is significantly smaller than their rivals, but even they managed to tick along while playing in a ground with the capacity roughly the same as a large pub (social distancing notwithstanding).
Nobody is going to claim in good faith that the stadium is unimpressive. Far from it. It is magnificent. But the reason that as fans we’re not over-encumbered with fawning gratitude for the club’s buildings and infrastructure, however glorious, is exactly the same reason that theatergoers visiting the West End aren’t left completely overcome by the beautiful, ornate auditorium of the Novello Theatre. It’s nice and all, but we’re really not there for the architecture. We’re there hoping for a good show. This point seems rather lost on Daniel.
The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, aka White Elephant Lane, is a hollow trinket. It’s a shiny silver and glass box full of disappointment. The polish on a turd. The lipstick on a pig. And it seems somewhat symbolic of the club’s current hierarchy that a massive cock sits atop it.
Yet we are told time and time again that everything the board does is done in the long-term interests of the club, though what ‘long-term’ might be if twenty years is only the short term. But we’re told we must look to the future. Jam tomorrow. Again. Most brow-beaten Spurs fans have accepted by this point that there actually is no jam. It’s sham jam. We certainly know that nothing whatsoever will change in the short or medium term.
The THST will go back to the shadows and their spineless ENIC apologism. The paternal Daniel has given Daddy’s Little Soldiers a placatory donut to stop them crying (hollowed out with an IOU for future jam, obviously) after their bruised egos, yet everyone but them is acutely aware that their place on the board with full voting rights is in reality a worthless sop – with the rest of the board being ENIC appointees, and therefore more of Daniel’s coterie of yes-men, the number of times the THST’s vote will make a difference to a decision can be counted on the trophies the club has delivered in the last decade. In the meantime Daniel can claim to have made a huge concession to the fans and appointed to the board a group of spineless self-publicists who in truth have never truly represented the fans or truly challenged Levy.
And so we go on. It’s Daniel’s world and we’re all just living in it, albeit without the rose-tinted retinas. Spurs will continue to be a balance sheet first and a football club second. An expensively-housed vacuum of success. And Daniel will continue to be baffled that this is not where elite players like Harry Kane want to be, and that the fans somehow aren’t grateful.
Ambition. Success. Free-flowing football. These are all terms for which Daniel struggles to clearly grasp the definition and meaning, yet there is one word that is quite clearly defined. ‘Levy’ is defined as a form of taxing.