The difference between myself and Simon Jordan is that I fully comprehend that I don’t know what I am talking about. I have never managed a football club, I have never played anything close to professional football and one look at my manly form will tell you, “He ain’t no athlete!”.
I am a football fan, a worshipper from ‘The Lane’. I can spout words about 4-4-2 or the high press but, when I look in the mirror, I have to admit that my technical knowledge of the sport I love is negligible. So what? That’s life and we all have different skills and abilities, only fools think they are good at everything!
The fan base at Tottenham is packed with talents that range from delivering the mail on a cold morning to working on corporate takeovers or delivering babies in a maternity ward. We are a rich and diverse cosmopolitan community bursting with abilities and united by a cause.
That word ‘cause’ has a deadly effect on the human mind. Without a cause, you can’t fill the trenches and populate the battlefields with corpses. Thankfully our cause does not hide fatal consequences; once our battle is over we all disperse and go home safely.
That’s why the only time we all act together is when we rise from our seats as Harry Kane rushes towards the goal. Inside the stadium are we truly united and working together with one intent. Once outside we revert to our everyday lives and argue with each other about what needs to happen next at Spurs. In many ways that is exactly how things should be, after all, this is all about entertainment, not corporate strategies.
However, that perspective only really works when the fans are happy with the club management. When they are not, things can become fractious, voices get raised and banners unfurled. Such circumstances are not uncommon in this entertainment business [ it’s not an industry ].
Yet it is only we fans who feel that tension, the owners feel nothing unless they see a threat to their wealth. We do not have the power to pose that threat and 30 people protesting at the training ground isn’t enough to scare the caretaker let alone anyone at board level.
Consequently, right now perhaps we should be considering what it is we can do? Maybe we should take a moment to consider what is possible? Perhaps we should be focusing on what is real and how we can help shape the future of the club we love?
We have to start with the position that we all know that working together simply doesn’t happen. That’s called being real. There is something about the human animal’s love of hierarchy that stops us from establishing the common good as our purpose. Queen Elisabeth II is on the throne today because the first country to execute a king and replace divine right with commonwealth couldn’t prevent argument and factionalisation. Therefore, we know that revolution is not the way forward, it never has been and history tells us that does not work. Our only chance is evolution.
The reality before us, as a guaranteed certainty, is that one day there will be new owners of THFC. We know those owners will be extremely wealthy and because of the stadium and its NFL potential, they are likely to be American. Our most pressing problem is, with the proposition Levy has constructed at Spurs, we could be jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.
Let’s consider this! We are a sports and entertainment complex catering to live concerts, NFL football, English soccer [forgive me, but I am wielding the knife here] with state-of-the-art facilities and a substantial property portfolio in London.
In addition, the offering on the table for a prospective buyer also includes access to a highly lucrative global media distribution machine that feeds a global audience. Further, there is a real prospect that in the future, English elite soccer clubs will be able to create their own media distribution and manage their media product for their benefit. Well, that’s what Simon Jordan says!
Whilst we are all talking about our football club and our feelings and our importance as fans, what is being sold from under our feet is a completely different commercial animal and ‘soccer’ is an ever diminishing value on its balance sheet. I am sure you can all see the danger when what THFC represents to a potential owner is not a football club but a global media opportunity.
Who would this sale appeal to?
Straight away, you can hear the nonsense of business babble as the CEO of Walt Disney steps in front of the camera and starts talking about “…natural synergies and obvious potentials for cash revenues and profit centre leveraging…”. The next thing we know is that we have Mickey Mouse as CEO! [the comments section is below].
Once we have peaked over the abyss to view the calamity of getting entirely the wrong owner then perhaps we can consider how we, the fans, can help to attract the right owner. The beauty of such a strategy is that we do not have to act together, we can all contribute to this effort individually and entirely in our way.
How does this work? Simply of course!
In any corporate buy-out, millions of dollars are spent on due diligence; the process of checking that what you are buying stacks up and you are not being sold a sack of brown stuff. In the 21st century, part of this process is called e-discovery and law firms make huge sums of money trawling through all available information on global digital media.
There has been a huge amount of investment in software and bots to facilitate this search. What that means for us is that everything published, this blog, that blog, your blog, Twitter, and the rest gets taken up in that process of due diligence.
The more we start to put out there what character of owner we want the more we are taking some control of the battleground of the future, our future. If we start considering what type of owner we want and start publishing why we want that owner, the more attractive we become to the right owner and the less attractive to the wrong owner.
OK, OK, OK, this is highly speculative but it is founded on working principles. Besides, what else do we have, not buying beer at half-time?
The final question is not why this will work but how it will work. At this point, we come back to the crowd in the stadium and all the skills that lie currently dormant there.
We must have several thousand supporters who know what due diligence is all about on a professional level. They know what they are talking about.
We must have several thousand supporters who have been involved in business buyouts small and large. They know what they are talking about.
We certainly have several hundred thousand fans around the world who would want to choose the next owner of the club they love. They know what they are talking about.
Spurs fans are no fools, they know what they are capable of in themselves but now is the time to realise what we are capable of as a whole. We do not have to do it together, we can do it all in individual ways and from within our comfort zones.
We just have to start the debate in digital media and amongst our friends which asks, “Who is the best owner for Tottenham Hotspurs? Who is the owner who will protect our football club as the primary duty of care of their ownership?”
We need to ask every Spurs fan who they think would be a great candidate for our next owner.
That is how our due diligence starts in our search for the right owner. We can at least take some sort of control over our destiny by just publishing as much material as possible about potential new owners.
We are saying to Levy, “You are history, and we are looking to the future”. We can bring levels of expertise to the debate that owners would have to pay thousands of pounds for just because our lawyers, our business people, our bankers, our postal staff, our tradespeople, our bus drivers, our doctors and nurses, our journalists, and blog writers, everyone in the stadium rising in hope of a winning goal, is a Spurs fan.
History tells us that revolutions have never worked, but revolutionary thinking has always been the way forward. Consign ENIC to history and let’s start our search for the new owners.
Blimey https://www.youtube.com/c/THEBOYHOTSPURYOUTUBE/featured
