The Levy Legacy – What Might Have Been
In evaluating the career of Daniel Levy as Tottenham Hotspur chairman, only one thing can be said with any degree of certainty. If someone reaches a straightforward conclusion, they’re wrong.
Although he took his time, he has undoubtedly transformed the club. White Hart Lane is one of the eternal loves of my life, but it couldn’t cope with Spurs’ popularity, the paint was peeling, the tea undrinkable to the point where I swear it took off a layer of sink enamel when you chucked it away and as often as not, our pre-game ritual included clearing the caked pigeon crap from our seats. Now, we’re amongst the highest earning clubs in the world with a global profile, the stadium is packed for every league game and, finally, we have a European trophy.
Yet the majority of his time as chairman has seen consistent, albeit not universal, disquiet within the fanbase about the quality of his leadership and the direction in which he appeared to be steering the club. This has taken many forms, from grumbling into our beers in the Antwerp to social media whinging and protests inside and outside the ground. Spurs fans have a long and my view proud history of active protest, dating back to complaints in the early 1960s about ticket allocation led by women fans, through to Left On the Shelf, TISA and the AGM protests. Since 2001, as well as ‘Levy Out’ protests with varying degrees of support, we have We Are N17, the superleague, Save Our Seniors, Stop Exploiting Loyalty and last season’s marches, banners and chanting in the ground. For a leader who in some quarters is currently being held up as an exemplary football club chair, that’s some achievement.
These positions appear inconsistent. In fact, they expose the fundamentally contradictory essence of Levy’s time as Spurs chair. If there is anything exemplary about his reign, it is as a model of the nature of contemporary football. Spurs are inextricably involved in a game increasingly dominated by the imperative to generate the level of income required to compete, both on a national and global level. As fans, we can’t avoid engaging in this, but for all the benefits, there are costs too. Levy’s financial acumen placed Spurs in an enviable position competitively but at one and the same time was the chief reason behind both our failure to achieve consistent success on the field and to understand the full impact for loyal supporters.
In the early 1980s, Irving Scholar took over as Spurs chairman, a man on a mission to drag the club kicking and screaming into the modern era by maximising income not only from ticket sales but also from other commercial activities. We had to wait another 30 years before that vision translated into reality. Under Levy’s stewardship, commercial growth improved from £13.6m in 1999-00 to £244.7m in 23-24 (source: the Athletic). Today, the ground is full every week and each matchday generates an estimated £5m. This doesn’t include TV revenue. There is a substantial income stream from boxing, NFL and concerts.
The new stadium, financed within our means, is a fine place to watch football, with stands close to the pitch and excellent sightlines. The seating encourages fans to lean in, be a part of the game, even if like me you’re towards the back of the stands. Also, and the designers don’t get sufficient praise for this, it’s convivial through the simple expedient of being able to walk round the concourse to most parts of the ground, impossible in the old Lane, to meet friends.
Frankly, it is unlikely that the ground will be named the Daniel Levy Stadium, but he deserves full credit for all this. The question remains, though, what was the purpose? Many years ago, I wrote a piece asking the question, what is a football club for? Pretty basic, but seldom made explicit. My answer would be something about aiming for success on the field and at the same time paying due respect to the club’s supporters. I have intentionally chosen the word ‘aiming’. I don’t carry an entitlement to success. What I want is for us to be contenders, to be clear-minded about what it takes to build and sustain club challenging for honours.
Finding the answer was beyond Daniel Levy’s capabilities. Perhaps he never understood the question. Having established a solid, essential foundation in terms of financial stability, he was largely incapable of building upon it. If there is a phrase to characterise his tenure, it’s ‘opportunities missed’. There are many examples. Creating a coach/director of football structure then continually changing manager, then not supporting managers in the market. Doing well in the table, on the up, need a striker, so it’s Frazer Campbell on loan, or Saha on a free, or successive windows without buying anyone. While I realise Pochettino was resistant to change in the squad, not reinforcing the team at that point was an era-defining error. More recently, the low income to salaries ratio and the apparent reluctance to free up money for the wages to snag top quality players.
More than just about the money, it is failure of organisation. Any football at any level revolves around the interaction between three elements, namely coaching, recruitment and finance. The chair’s primary responsibility is to make that interaction functions smoothly and with purpose, that is to do well on the pitch. That’s what CEOs, MDs whatever you call them, do in the commercial world. They take the decisions that enable other people, specialists in their field, to do their job to the best of their ability and Levy was largely unable to achieve this.
This has unfortunately been a consistent feature of his time in charge. Coaches not being given the players they needed. Recruitment at odds with the coach (‘a club signing’) or being marginalised, such as Paul Mitchell being head hunted then leaving. There’s a long list here that could take a blog piece in itself so I won’t go on, except to say that in the last 18 months Levy made efforts to sort this out yet again. It remains to be seen if that forms part of his legacy.
What has always puzzled me is that the opportunities I describe as being missed were themselves created by Levy’s decisions. At successive points, say, under Redknapp or Poch, a couple of judicious purchases could have elevated the team into real contenders. I’m not talking about chucking money at the problem. I’m talking about, for instance, a classy midfielder and striker that we had the means to pay for. After all, in Levy’s terms as a businessman, such purchases become an investment to be repaid through CL and PL revenue.
As fans, we saw this all too clearly, and I’ve never grasped why he or the rest of the board could not. I can only conclude that he is cautious man, and there’s nothing wrong with that, who does not fully understand the game even after 25 years in charge. He never quite understood how to achieve success on the pitch. The appointment of two managers, Mourinho and Conte, unsuited to the club’s needs, to the organization and financial situation that he created, because they had the reputation of being winners, is another example.
Which leaves the question that has dogged his regime. The ‘I’ in ENIC stands for investment, and a club they bought for around £25m is now worth £3 or 4 billon. Nice work if you can get it. Undoubtedly, increasing the return on their investment is a core aim and buying players or indeed lowering ticket prices can be seen as detracting from that. Again though, given the sums of money involved, I’ve never fully understood why they could not find a compromise, that is earn vast profits while still freeing up relatively small sums to buy more players or limit ticket prices. I’m deliberately expressing this in straightforward terms – this isn’t about nuance, it’s about basic questions on how to run a football club.
I don’t believe it is naïve to suggest a better set of decisions in this respect were available and the board opted to go in a different direction. All this exposes the flaw of Levy’s lack of ambition. He seems to be content to participate in tournaments rather than go out to win them, the superleague being another example. Lloris’s story of Levy presenting the players with watches, paid for not by the club but by a sponsor, to congratulate players for reaching the CL says so much. Levy wanted to be at the top table but was at pains not to offend his hosts, by the effrontery of actually winning something.
And what is a club for if not for the fans? Unequivocally, the stadium in N17 is major and lasting achievement. But that’s not the whole story. I do not want to forget, as many media articles this week have, how we got there, with Daniel Levy leading on advanced plans to move the club to Stratford and in the process demolish an Olympic Stadium that for a couple of years at least was a symbol of something that brought the nation warmth and happiness. He speaks of the club’s heritage, yet at that point was prepared to jettison that for the economic benefits of moving to east London.
Neither do I forget that ticket prices are among the highest in Europe. It’s up to me and you if we wish to pay them, but being a fan is about something fundamental to our identity and sense of self. It is about who we are. This is why we keep coming back. Two trophies in 25 years, there are no gloryhunters at Spurs yet up to 250,000 people come into the streets on a working day to celebrate.
The club do not fully appreciate what Spurs mean to their fans. Worse, they think they do but they don’t. I don’t believe they look after us as well as they could. The prices deter many longstanding fans from coming and exclude many others altogether. Our football wins two trophies in 25 years. We hear about the Spurs family, which excludes many young fans, prevents season ticket holders from using spares to introduce family members to our great club and limits the amount of senior tickets available, pricing out fans who have been going for decades. Our chairman was paid £6m in a year when we won nothing and the stadium was 18 months late.
My own research shows that many supporters, while remaining loyal, are becoming disaffected. In particular they feel the club has a poor relationship with the fans. They treat fans in an impersonal way – we are not individuals but are customer numbers, whose needs could be easily accommodated but the club chooses to look away. For example, the allocation of tickets in the new ground gave insufficient value to longstanding supporters and split up long established family and friends groups. High prices mean fans feel their loyalty is a commodity, to be exploited. Premium seating blocks exclude many fans and do not contribute to the best possible atmosphere.
The impact on supporters of these aspects of being a Spurs fan is given insufficient weight. These things matter. They also result from decisions taken by the club. Other options were available, are available, but discounted. These things are the way the board wanted them to be. Plus, on top of which we contend with other parts of the modern game, such as TV dominated fixture schedules, late changes to fixtures and policing in the ground.
In my view, and I’ve never met the man although I know many who have, Levy is a genuine supporter and wants the best for Spurs. However, he was never able to be sure about what that means, and that has held us back. So much promise, so many opportunities, some successes, so many unfulfilled. Rather than entering into interaction and dialogue, he and the board retreated and put up barriers. They fell into a form of groupthink without taking advice from outside. I doubt he has the emotional intelligence to be confident in himself, see how he presented to others and to take on board constructive criticism.
History will continue to explore these contradictions but without, I suspect, ever fully resolving them, because these are the contradictions of the modern game and being a fan. Generate income, find success on the field, but why should that be at the expense of loyalty? The questions remain and in that sense truly, Daniel Levy is a chair of our times.