Call me Ishmail. Last night’s Champions League performance against Red Bull Leipzig is not worthy of analysis, much in the same way that when somebody’s house burns down, nobody in their right mind asks what channel the TV was on at the time.
Were Hugo LLoris’ crisp-packet hands to blame, or was an unconvincing midfield partnership the root of our demise, last night? Who might possibly care?!
The facts of the matter are these. ENIC have embarked upon a pioneering business model which may or may not succeed, but what we can say with absolute certainty, is that the path we’re upon – the path that will last my generation- is one deeply uncomfortable ride.
The investment in the infrastructure of the business over sufficient investment in the squad has come at an awful cost, a truly terrible cost. The squad that primed of greatness under Mauricio Pochettino was left to wither. Indeed, Poch told us in plain words, that the rebuild would be painful.
DL responded that the expectation was that income reinvestment would grow the equity value but that there was no intention to sell and that no valuation had been made of the equity value
Daniel Levy
This week, the THST provided quotes from Daniel Levy that revealed to some fans that the club was not for sale. I say ‘some’ as this site’s readers were advised a long, long time ago that the combination of ENIC’s borrowings (in the club’s name) and FFP would make Spurs impossible to sell to anyone seeking to make a profit in their own lifetime.
“No intention to sell” is classic Levy, Razor Ruddock may as well announce he has “no plans to join the Royal Ballet”.
From understatement to diversion a heartbeat. Levy then points to the equity of the business. Which neatly distracts from what owning THFC really offers on a realtime basis, which allows Levy to be one of the highest-paid football CEO’s on the planet, despite having won just one trophy in twenty years. Oh, and an additional property portfolio that would make your head spin.
The only coherent conclusion that be possibly drawn, is that the milking of Spurs will continue, probably forever, and bar some minor miracles (kindly note the plural) then the football at Spurs will remain mediocre for an equally long time.
I became jaundiced with this mob long before a brick was laid, as the whole sorry affair was all too predictable. The weirdo propagandists have done their best, but nothing would ever be enough to prevent the truth from getting out.
I understand that meetings have already taken place and that a series of protests are being provisionally organized. Nobody wants to go down that route, but I have to wish these people well. They feel cheated, and frankly, they are right to feel that way.
Well said!
Club football world cup. South Americans at the lane. Love it. The older I get the better entertainment is getting in Tottenham. Levy. You know you gotta chuck Jose a chunk a money next window duncha. He needs 3 readys in. And a £10m punt on a quality teenager. Oh a nearly ready player would be nice too.
Conniving with government to bend the rules as they did so.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Dreams of something better coming taste like ashes now.
With a manager saying we don’t need a major overhaul.
Paradise Lost.
Hugo. I hear you’re well listened to in the dressing room. Try transferring that to the pitch. Oh what’s the point, they can’t hear you. Your defenders in front of you can. Its kinda your fault your defenders are all over the place. STOP THEM STRAYING
José. Not telling you how to do your job but distances between the lines in relation to the ball in training today please. COYS
😂😂
“Grey and diminished future? OK then. COYS.
Traveling yids. You smashed it out there. Noised it up🌚 proud a ya
i never beleved a second of it and nor did many on here. I hate the owners and have bitterly for so long that now that it has come to a head i dont know what to do with myself. Your words will mostly fall on deaf ears. The club is dead and people who dont agree lost that war. We lost. It is over.
Super stuff ,sadly it’s true and my clubs owners…
So we have arrived at the perfect storm. A billion dollar stadium and world class training facilities gleaming in the spring sunshine whilst the football team using them look like a Trotters Trading Company Reliant Regal. 20 years of neglect have led us to this lemming like situation where many of the most die hard of Spurs fans are walking comatose to the edge of the cliff bereft of any future hope and battered and broken by the emotional collateral damage inflicted by the parasitical Corona Virus ENIC20. A slow lingering wasting disease that over a two decade period sucks the blood out of its victim leaving nothing but an empty shell with no substance. The despair around the once proud cockeral and its emblazoned soundbites of “to Dare is To Do” and “Its All About The Glory” is so overwhelming that you can almost feel its texture and taste its rancid flavour percolating to the top of the upside down dispensing ales served in the Craft Beer parlours of the NFL Stadium. Twenty long and tortuous years of the parasite spinning its snake oil promise of jam tomorrow whilst it sank its poisonous fangs deeper into the flesh of the host. Yet as is the custom with Spurs fans so desperate were we to believe, so desperate were we to smell the sweet taste of success that we blindly sank our head in the sands of the promised land hoping to pull them out one day and gaze upon the long awaited panorama of a THFC Shangri La. During that time our best players have been sold to buy in lesser younger players with a sell on potential. Think, Carrick, Berbatov, Keane, Bale, Modric. Eriksen et al. Our ancestral home has been raised to the ground and a multiplex NFL events centre has replaced its once hallowed walls and this has been built on debt financing in which THFC are now just an anchor tenant. So as we plucked our heads from its submersion in the smoke filled mirrors of the ENIC lie we see not a lost paradise but a desolate landscape with little to be hopeful about, with the very real prospect of no more European football for the foreseeable future leading to the inevitable loss of Kane and Son plus the inability to replace with any quality as a result of a reducing investment in the football business justified by the slide towards mediocrity. A road beckons us towards a grey and diminished future whilst the parasites gorge themselves into a state of obese gluttony feeding on the debt financed revenues that they have created. There is no dare to do, no glory, nothing to satisfy the emotional connection between the business of THFC and the customers of that business. The lust for succour of the parasite has begun now to eat away the unconditional generational support that has fed the host for over 100 years. Those who have forged their relationship with the club through generation after generation are now stating that they are no longer feeling that immersive connection. Will it take an arrow from the bow of that unconditional support to strike a blow at the achilles heel of ENIC in order that it releases its death grip and allows the host to breathe again and regenerate?
They don’t care Gazza, those quotes from Levy before they bought into Spurs tell you everything. They don’t care about football.
The football is purely incidental in their project to buy up underpriced land in London and develop it. No problem with that, lots of developers do it. I’m talking about people that run a top football club, aren’t I? Maybe I’m not… 😂
It is shameful at the moment….
Ah, but don’t moan about it. The owners deserve your full support at all times.
I derive no pleasure in saying ‘I told you so’ when it comes to this great club, but many of us predicted this nonsense about two seasons ago.
Personally I feel that Mitchell being shown the door was the beginning of the end for Poch in retrospect.
That was the point when Levy made it quite clear that they weren’t backing him…
Spurs are going to break Mourinho, arent we?
To glean any pleasure from this at the moment Ive taken to picking out the glimpses of potential improvements we can look forward to next season.
This amounts to watching Gio on the ball. This lad is good and I cant wait for a fully functioning midfield to be in place around him. Watcha mean I’ll be waiting a long time?
Tanganga’s calmness and good reading of the game.
That’s it.
Maybe Levy will try cheap players from Germany? He got lucky with Poch, he can get lucky again.
I think one of the factors here is that Levy thinks he knows about football, a striker is just a forward. The issue going forward will be backing Jose by getting Willian free, Smalling cheap and a few other ageing but tough plodders like Fellaini to put up a brick wall. Parrott will be another Pogba, Tanguy a De Bruyene somewhere else. Sessegnon already looks like he doesn’t know what to do on the pitch. Depressing.
Priceless.
That’s one of the reasons I was gutted when Poch wasn’t backed. We are back in the football dark ages. In many ways Poch was prophetic and perhaps lucky to be out of this implosion. To see Nagelmanns side play with purpose and confidence shows what football playing managers who are supported can achieve. Every team in the E P L knows what we are going to do and they gain in confidence. I’ll never see Spurs back in the CL in my lifetime. Don’t want Harry to go to Utd but he must move on for his own career. Enic will suck him dry.
Top article Harry. Has any journalist ever followed up on the property portfolio rort? Would be great to see the forensic blowtorch on Levy in the wider public arena.
Wisdom, that’s what you call it!! 😂
I predict that was probably the last Champions League match Spurs will play for many years now…
Yes!!! And soon to be a museum so we can remember when we didnt need crash helmets ahh the wisdom of enic
Desire, hunger and whatever that entails is down to the coaching staff. Who else is it?
You instill it within the group and individuals you have, the ones that don’t come with you, you move on.
Jose hasn’t really shown any regenerative powers whatsoever. That’s before you even get into the ‘rabbit in the headlights’ sitting deep…
With crash helmets in it! 😂
and bottoms up filling pints….
🤣👍
And a shop
It’s all quite depressing and the new stadium actually makes it feel worse. At least WHL had its Glory days bedded deep within it.
Right now all we have is a fantastically designed monument to failure…
I may invest in a pigeon business…
It wouldn’t be so bad if we were being outplayed by better opposition, but we’re not really sure if that’s the case, as our boys really have no plan, no motivation, so desire, apart from maybe Gio and Lucas.
Poch may have had no plan B, but he had a pretty good plan A. What is our plan A?
Soak up pressure, concede goals and lose?
We’re not a pressing team, we’re not an attacking team, I don’t know what the plan is and they don’t seem to know either.
Yes, ENIC have hung us out to dry, yes we’ve got no Kane and no Son, but we’ve had that before…the lack of plan seems to be the problem on the pitch. The problem off the pitch evidently isn’t going away, so the manager has to at least get the boys playing with some sort of style and dare I say it “philosophy”.
Jose, buck up or ship out. Why not just throw the kitchen sink at teams and try and outscore them? We can’t defend, so why not attack? I’d rather have seen us go down 5-2 with some fight than that drivel last night.
Now I’m actually hoping the Man U game gets chopped because of COVID so I can get my money back.
The propagandists seem to have been trying to get out in front of the inevitable implosion to head off any criticism of the investors. I’ve
heard repeated demands across spurs podcasts recently that a statue be erected to the little accountant outside the enic dome.
That’s a stadium whose proposed cost of 400m was tripled by the time of completion; providing the excuse for zero investment in poch’s title challenging team and for botching the signing of one difference-making player after another (mane, grealish, bruno..)
In the course of wrecking everything poch had built the little investment guy humbly awarded himself a salary twice as high as that of the next highest paid chairman
Poch was then fired for having the temerity to be proved glaringly right about the need for serious investment and a painful overhaul.
The visionary, feeling the heat, hastily replaced a coach who needed the lowest net spend to succeed with tne one who requires the highest expenditure — yet refused to give him even one striker to achieve top 4 and compete in the fa cup and CL.
With collapse inevitable, the priority was to confuse and gaslight the support in relation to the ownership. Suddenly out of nowhere come demands for statues …
Looking at the table now the CL is finally over I don’t see any hope there. Levy has been told now by two managers investment is required. My guess is with no CL next year or europa league I see us dropping as low as 11th it will be the old sell before you buy. The thing that I can’t get is how expensive was that striker we didn’t buy. Or rather what cost to the club going out last night and no CL next year compared to buying that striker. Which would cost more or less for that matter. Only the bald one knows that.
I couldn’t agree more with your sentiments. I had been worried that for some incomprehensible reason, that you had gone soft on Levy, but I guess not. If I lived in the UK , I would certainly join any protests against Enic, but knowing the Spurs fans, I doubt they will come to much. I think for the first time in over fifty years, I am not going to watch them on the tv for the rest of the season. I have no doubts that both Kane and Mourinho will be gone by the end of the season. RIP Spurs.
Levy failed to back Poch when we got to the final of the CL. I remember Poch was desperate to shift a few players because he saw the danger signs. Even Toby was one of the players he wanted to move on. Even the players became unhappy because of the lack of investment in them, and in the team. Poch then became the sacrificial lamb so that Levy doesn’t come out looking the bad wolf. His plan B was a quick fix in bringing in Jose, a proven winner, but now we are all seeing a much deeper truth. You can bring in a magician it will not change a thing, they must invest in the team with quality players and not bargain basement French players. The jig is up now Levy! The fans feel cheated in so many ways. I feel cheated! We all have a huge emotional investment in this club, some of us for many years, and it’s really tiresome being on this emotional roller-coaster.