The Wednesday Spurs: The Trouble With Levy Out
Few would argue that Spurs haven't been run in an unsatisfactory way for quite a while, on the pitch at least, but there are really, genuinely are worse options out there.
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Exactly how you quantify the Tottenham Hotspurness of Tottenham Hotspur can be difficult to express, at times. In some respects, it rests in the dust accumulating in the trophy cabinets, easily quantifiable as a very low number indeed, at least in the 21st century.
But in another it’s more of a vibes thing. I was absolutely confident, for example, that they would beat Manchester United last Sunday because a, Manchester United really are as much of a shambles as Spurs, just in a very different way, and b, because offering up these little tasters is something Spurs do so well. Remember when they took a 1-0 lead against Liverpool in the EFL Cup, held onto it for four weeks, and then got blown away in the second leg? Good times.
Ange Postecoglou isn’t universally popular among the club’s supporters, but there does seem to be a general feeling that just blaming the manager isn’t quite enough. There has started to grow a feeling that this is an institutional issue, that after the best part of a quarter of a century ENIC are not even really prioritising their football club to the same extent that they are their gleaming, shiny new enorm-o-dome.
But just shouting “ENIC OUT” or “LEVY OUT” isn’t necessarily easy these days, because no Premier League club sale is easy these days. The financial means required to operate one of these narrows the field of who can own them to a fairly tiny number, with the ethical end of football club ownership having been completely hollowed out, anywhere near this end of the game.
ENIC’s ownership of Spurs hasn’t been a successful period for the club. We all know that. Any issues relating to the culture of the club, it at least seems likely, begin from the head down. But there’s always a point at which we should be careful what we wish for. Manchester United supporters protested long and hard for the removal of the Glazer family from their club, but what they ended up with was the Glazers still there and controlling it all, with Jim Ratcliffe and INEOS running day-to-day operations with, from what we can gather, little distinction.
The name that keeps coming up in association with Spurs is, of course, ‘Qatar’, but Spurs being Spurs they can’t even sell their souls to the devil without tripping over their own shoelaces. As of last week, there were reports that the club could be considering a phased bail-out to the oil money while retaining Levy in charge of the day-to-day running of the club. It was just about the Spursest leak that could have come out.
How are we supposed to feel about all of this? Well, the first thing to say there is, does it really matter? Fans can protest all they like, but if you want to see an object lesson in DGAFness, it’s allowing a story like that to be leaked into the public domain just as protests against Levy are starting to turn up a notch. The exact identity of those concerned is not clear, though it’s not believed to be Qatar Sports Investment (QSI) fund or Sheikh Jassim.
It’s not all about the sportswashing, of course. Let’s not go thinking that American hedge funds are a more ethical state of affairs, not with the way things are going in that country at the moment. Stan Kroenke donated $1m to his country’s current president for the 2016 election. We’ve all seen the patchy job that Chelsea’s new owners have made of running that club since 2022. They’re also problematic. It might be argued that there can be no such thing as an ‘ethical billionaire’.
The reason the hedge funds are here is because they think our game is massively undervalued. They’re here to turn a massive profit, and they don’t give a tuppenny damn what you or I think about that. The average price of an NFL ticket is $132 (£105, at the current exchange rate), and if you think that this new influx of owners aren’t seriously scratching their heads over why fans in this country are paying an average of around half that in this country, you haven’t been paying close enough attention to what’s already been happening to ticket prices in this country.
None of this is to say that Daniel Levy or ENIC are any good, although the stadium—which we might consider their one true love in N17—is built and is spectacular. The problem is that we’re not stadium fans. We’re football fans, and ultimately our experience of the game is dictated by the fortunes of our team on the pitch and not by the quality of the facilities at which we experience it all.
Their original takeover of the club came about in slow motion. ENIC bought a controlling share in the club in 2001, but didn’t buy out the last of Alan Sugar’s shares and take the 85% shareholding that they have today for another six years. But whether we go from 2001 to 2007, they’ve had long enough, running this football club.
It hasn’t been universally disastrous. There was a trophy, early on, there was a Premier League runners-up spot and a Champions League final appearance. Most football clubs would give their high teeth for that sort of ‘failure’. But the problem is that when you build a 60,000 capacity enorm-o-dome expectation levels will rise, particularly from those paying more than a grand a season for the privilege of watching matches there.
But rather than taking the club to any new sort of level, The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium has witnessed several seasons of relative stasis which has started to sag into some form of decline. Beating Manchester United in the Premier League last weekend was still a saggy win. This was not the performance of a good football team, although it was slightly better coordinated than it has largely been, of late.
We do need to think carefully about who owns Tottenham Hotspur Football Club next because even though we don’t own it, it is ours, and no matter how Daniel Levy and ENIC might be, there can be other horrors awaiting, just around the corner. It is one of the great tragedies of the game in this country over the last thirty years that this takeover by massive wealth has come to pass, and there was probably never anything that we could have done about it. Just don’t be relying on this particular football club to be making the right decision for the right reasons. They could easily fail on either or both fronts.