Levy's Plan

[Mikey10]

Silly to remove him mid season, no way he would have let Frank stay that long. Brain dead decision to give him the January transfer window - Levy would have sacked him after West Ham.

A new manager’s made all the difference.

 

[Muttley]

I think he was the best Chairman in the league up until 2018, and then he became one of the worst, or certainly one of the middle of the pack.

In the business sense, you could be right. In the football sense, less so.

Levy failed very badly in the post COVID years. He can probably be forgiven for the stadium delays in both getting the project started and hitting his committed finish dates. Putting that to one side, his leadership of the club post 2019 was pretty poor on the football operational side of the house. The situation we find ourselves in now still has his paw prints all over it unfortunately. I know fans will naturally shift their anger onto Lewis's family and guys like Vinai and Lange but that suddenly doesn't change what happened under Levy's stewardship as we came out of the couple of COVID years.

I've always felt Levy is a good guy, he's one of us and his intentions were always about Spurs. However, as a leader he never protected his organisation from his own weaknesses on the football operational side. He'd be the last person I'd want to be hiring and firing football managers at any club at any level. He just doesn't have the football smarts. I'm not sure I'd want him alongside me in a negotiation room either but that's just me.

What we really needed was Levy being our high profile chairman, but moving upstairs away from the CEO pieces. He was in effect operating as chairman of the board and CEO. Not sure about anyone else but I've not even hear the words "Peter Charrington" since the appointment. How can he be sitting back when all this is happening. Isn't he supposed to be the mentor and advocate for Vinai and they are supposed to work together as a leadership team. Is that actually happening?

Also, what exactly is happening with the top to bottom culture of the club. Does that same culture propagate right up into ENIC and Tavistock. Is "nearly good enough" a company culture that precipitates through the entire Tavistock group? It sickens me when I see everyone from the current England captain / former Spurs player to the newest recruits thinking it is OK to give less than 100% in their roles. Culture comes from the very top and something is really broken at THFC in that area. It is probably the biggest root cause in all of this.

 

[SissokoWasGood (BoL)]

In the business sense, you could be right. In the football sense, less so.

Levy failed very badly in the post COVID years. He can probably be forgiven for the stadium delays in both getting the project started and hitting his committed finish dates. Putting that to one side, his leadership of the club post 2019 was pretty poor on the football operational side of the house. The situation we find ourselves in now still has his paw prints all over it unfortunately. I know fans will naturally shift their anger onto Lewis's family and guys like Vinai and Lange but that suddenly doesn't change what happened under Levy's stewardship as we came out of the couple of COVID years.

I've always felt Levy is a good guy, he's one of us and his intentions were always about Spurs. However, as a leader he never protected his organisation from his own weaknesses on the football operational side. He'd be the last person I'd want to be hiring and firing football managers at any club at any level. He just doesn't have the football smarts. I'm not sure I'd want him alongside me in a negotiation room either but that's just me.

What we really needed was Levy being our high profile chairman, but moving upstairs away from the CEO pieces. He was in effect operating as chairman of the board and CEO. Not sure about anyone else but I've not even hear the words "Peter Charrington" since the appointment. How can he be sitting back when all this is happening. Isn't he supposed to be the mentor and advocate for Vinai and they are supposed to work together as a leadership team. Is that actually happening?

Also, what exactly is happening with the top to bottom culture of the club. Does that same culture propagate right up into ENIC and Tavistock. Is "nearly good enough" a company culture that precipitates through the entire Tavistock group? It sickens me when I see everyone from the current England captain / former Spurs player to the newest recruits thinking it is OK to give less than 100% in their roles. Culture comes from the very top and something is really broken at THFC in that area. It is probably the biggest root cause in all of this.

I completely agree with you.

I’ve said it over and over again but I think he failed to understand what made Tottenham different and special. Particularly under Poch, and let it go when he should have trusted him. But the general point I am in complete agreement on, he doesn’t really ‘get’ football, in the sense of what a club like Tottenham would need to do to truly compete. He sort of lucked in to Poch and then threw that away. And then it’s been thrashing from one thing to the next ever since. When we were supposed to be a truly big club rather than a best of the rest, I think he had no idea how to act with us in that position.

And I find that pretty amazing that after 25 years he never figured it out. But I guess it makes sense, he was great at getting us to be the best of the rest. Learning the lessons of Leeds etc who were his examples of ‘what not to do’ as he was coming in, and obviously amazing on the infrastructure. And I do think he genuinely cared. But he never figured out how to progress us from that position.

If we were ever going to progress, we needed to move on from him. But I do have sympathy for the constraints placed on him by ENIC too and ultimately we need to move on from them also.

 

[Muttley]

I completely agree with you.

I’ve said it over and over again but I think he failed to understand what made Tottenham different and special. Particularly under Poch, and let it go when he should have trusted him. But the general point I am in complete agreement on, he doesn’t really ‘get’ football, in the sense of what a club like Tottenham would need to do to truly compete. He sort of lucked in to Poch and then threw that away. And then it’s been thrashing from one thing to the next ever since. When we were supposed to be a truly big club rather than a best of the rest, I think he had no idea how to act with us in that position.

And I find that pretty amazing that after 25 years he never figured it out. But I guess it makes sense, he was great at getting us to be the best of the rest. Learning the lessons of Leeds etc who were his examples of ‘what not to do’ as he was coming in, and obviously amazing on the infrastructure. And I do think he genuinely cared. But he never figured out how to progress us from that position.

If we were ever going to progress, we needed to move on from him. But I do have sympathy for the constraints placed on him by ENIC too and ultimately we need to move on from them also.

Your ENIC comment is interesting and I've always felt Collecott was a massive part of the problem. If you think back to the model, Matthew was dual role as both THFC and ENIC CFO. That is a conflict of interest in my mind. Levy shouldn't have stood for that. He should have had his own finance guy. I firmly believe we've got our multi-year financial forecasting wrong so many times over the years. We always end up behind the curve, so much so that we were recording record profits at one point and giving free handouts to HMRC. Just that alone was the difference between the salaries our players wanted and what they got.

I'm not saying it is easy, but both Levy and Collecott (plus Cullen, Caplehorn, Kemsley etc) just didn't figure some of this out. When I think about the manager turnaround, I'm shocked some of these execs kept their positions for so long. They weren't earning their salary. They were also Levy hires.

 

[SteveAWOL]

At least that gentleman’s agreement between Levy & Bale was honoured, even though ManUre outbid Madrid for our Gareth… a pity our special relationship didn’t really pan out though.

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[Finney Is Back]

It’s easy to point fingers at the guy in charge, but who here could name another chairman who would have come in and done a better job?

The fact we have crashed so spectacularly over the course of a few months since the nepo’s and their guys have taken over shows its not such an easy job.

You realise that Levy is one third of ENIC right?

 

[DubSpur]

You realise that Levy is one third of ENIC right?

And when it came to the crunch that one third didn't give him any power

 

[P.D.]

A new manager’s made all the difference.

Context would have been totally different, the January window for starters and more time not to scrabble around to find someone.

 

[Finney Is Back]

And when it came to the crunch that one third didn't give him any power

He had absolute power at THFC. He was the basically the sole decision maker at the club.

 

[ricky2tricky4city]

He had absolute power at THFC. He was the basically the sole decision maker at the club.

We're talking finance....don't play dumb

 

[SissokoWasGood (BoL)]

Your ENIC comment is interesting and I've always felt Collecott was a massive part of the problem. If you think back to the model, Matthew was dual role as both THFC and ENIC CFO. That is a conflict of interest in my mind. Levy shouldn't have stood for that. He should have had his own finance guy. I firmly believe we've got our multi-year financial forecasting wrong so many times over the years. We always end up behind the curve, so much so that we were recording record profits at one point and giving free handouts to HMRC. Just that alone was the difference between the salaries our players wanted and what they got.

I'm not saying it is easy, but both Levy and Collecott (plus Cullen, Caplehorn, Kemsley etc) just didn't figure some of this out. When I think about the manager turnaround, I'm shocked some of these execs kept their positions for so long. They weren't earning their salary. They were also Levy hires.

Could you be more specific in unpacking what you mean by the multi year forecasting? Genuinely interested in this angle, and I haven’t seen many others discuss it in this way.

 

[braineclipse]

He did an incredible job business-wise. No-one could've done any better (or indeed has). He was the perfect face of the Lewis Family investment in that regard.

He repeatedly got the football side of things wrong, and I think that is where the questions lie. How much of it was him versus his remit? How much of it was ego versus doing the right thing? How much of it was applying business brain to football matters, a translation which requires several bridges and parts to have any chance of success as the connection is not binary?

I get the impression he tried to find a bridge several times. Arnesen was big, so wasw Commoli, Baldini was another...I think the single biggest factor in our demise has been the inability to find the humanity and special sauce of Tottenham as a soul -as a football ethos- since we moved to the stadium, and I think sacking Pochettino and replacing him with Mourinho without giving Mourinho the tools HE needed was an enormous error (despite Mourinho saying he didn't need any - a 'football' person would've known that was BS)...I also wonder how big covid was in derailing us for a while. In one sense our timing was superb because we opened the stadium months before, in another, we needed it to be open a few years without interruption.

The other major errors IMO, were Munn and Lange, two men who do not seem to know emotion in the football sense. Sometimes the beautiful game requires more than a set of metrics. Sometimes it requires gut-level action, something Lange in particular has been unable to achieve at the right time.

The final one? Removing Levy when they did. It was absurd. Make that move at the end of a season, not at the end of a window into a new season with a new manager. Pathetically poor timing which obviously destabilized the entire club...

Do you think it was known in the upper strata of the club that Levy was leaving in the summer? In hindsight with Vinai coming in, Donna Cullen (I think) leaving before Levy, it looked to me like there was a plan there from earlier in the summer that Levy would be leaving and that the summer was essentially a hand over with the new people starting to take charge.

If it was a bombshell news to everyone involved that he left when he did that's obviously not good.

Levy has made some bad decisions on who to hire and trust for sure.

 

[thfcsteff]

Do you think it was known in the upper strata of the club that Levy was leaving in the summer? In hindsight with Vinai coming in, Donna Cullen (I think) leaving before Levy, it looked to me like there was a plan there from earlier in the summer that Levy would be leaving and that the summer was essentially a hand over with the new people starting to take charge.

If it was a bombshell news to everyone involved that he left when he did that's obviously not good.

Levy has made some bad decisions on who to hire and trust for sure.

I think it is safe to say an extremely small group knew what was going to happen; I think it's also safe to say the vast majority did not know. I personally find it unthinkable that Venkatesham did not know. I think it is also safe to say that Daniel Levy had no idea he was leaving/being shunted at that time, and let's face it, if there was a 'hand over' taking place, given it took Levy the better part of 25 years to build the system he did, only incompetant fools would believe you could execute such a 'handover' in a matter of two to three months? I do get the impression that Venkatesham is adept at body-swerving when necessary; I personally hope he does not survive this, along with the obvious Lange. Let's face the facts; he arrived in April 2025, and has been at the helm of a disastrous period of time, disastrous, the sort of 'reign' which would see anyone else made redundant.

 

[braineclipse]

I think it is safe to say an extremely small group knew what was going to happen; I think it's also safe to say the vast majority did not know. I personally find it unthinkable that Venkatesham did not know. I think it is also safe to say that Daniel Levy had no idea he was leaving/being shunted at that time, and let's face it, if there was a 'hand over' taking place, given it took Levy the better part of 25 years to build the system he did, only incompetant fools would believe you could execute such a 'handover' in a matter of two to three months? I do get the impression that Venkatesham is adept at body-swerving when necessary; I personally hope he does not survive this, along with the obvious Lange. Let's face the facts; he arrived in April 2025, and has been at the helm of a disastrous period of time, disastrous, the sort of 'reign' which would see anyone else made redundant.

Personally I think there's a decent chance Levy knew he was leaving, but probably we'll never know for sure.

 

[thfcsteff]

Personally I think there's a decent chance Levy knew he was leaving, but probably we'll never know for sure.

I would not take that bet at all. I am sure he might've thought at some point sooner than later, but I'd wager a lot on him having been as surprised as anyone by the timing.

 

[Gazza]

I would not take that bet at all. I am sure he might've thought at some point sooner than later, but I'd wager a lot on him having been as surprised as anyone by the timing.

Isn’t he chums with the Lewis family as well? Perhaps they had a chat and said that ENIC were copping a lot of heat via the fans getting on Levy and he was made the spacegoat perhaps?

Unless he’s never seen eye to eye with the nepos and they disposed of him like used toilet paper.

 

[ricky2tricky4city]

I think whatever happened, and how it happened doesn't feel like it was in the best interests of the club, and by continuation, us. (I don't mean, levy going or not btw)

The way it happened, and the timing, all look like moves to satisfy individual agendas.

Any sane business would have a longer handover period, and if that's not possible, at least announce the shake up a week or two after the season ends, so you have the whole summer to start the refresh

 

[Muttley]

Could you be more specific in unpacking what you mean by the multi year forecasting? Genuinely interested in this angle, and I haven’t seen many others discuss it in this way.

So in the THFC business model there is clearly an annual P&L and Balance Sheet. There is also a mid and long term plan. Within that there would be revenue and expenses that are very predictable and easily modelled. Above that there are some more difficult variables like whether we're in UEFA comps on the football side and whether we're about to upgrade sponsorship. Levy made a massive statement when he told us that the stadium build was mutually exclusive to the football operational side. He also said that the intention was to have CL revenues by the time we opened the stadium. We had that for 2 or 3 years prior to the stadium.

Spurs set a worldwide record in 2018 of £113m and followed that up with £69m, the year later. So £182m of profit over 2 years and something like £35m kindly donated to HMRC as tax. We then go into crazy spend mode and record a loss of way over £50m the year after. Fans just assumed it was just the CL monies. Absolutely not.

My strong belief is that if we had been able to smooth this graph, history could have been way less painful. That would have meant a better forecasting model obviously recalibrated each year. We needed player investment (transfers and salaries) as Poch's squad started to peak in 2017. That's when we had squad burnout. That's when we had injury build-up, especially soft tissue. That's when we had prime players needing fair salaries for their disposition as PL players. Instead, in COVID we were spending where other clubs were tightening their belts. We still couldn't buy quality though.

Best example is Toby
2015 - 5 year contract where he could earn up to £80k per week with bonuses. Became one of truly eite defenders in Europe.
Spurs leave him on £80k per week for 4 years of that contract
Dec 2019 - offers him a contract renewal until 2023, where he can earn up to £180k per week.
Toby gone in 2021.

So for all of our peak Toby years he was disenfranchised watching guys in the league at his level getting 2 or 3 times more salary than him. We were giving £35m to HMRC instead.

Perhaps real answer here is that there was no tangible MY forecast. Perhaps we were just being reactive and not proactive in the way the club was being financially modelled. The multi-year parameters when loaded together look very questionable. They look really sub-optimal. They needed smoothing out.

 

[Glenda's Legs]

So in the THFC business model there is clearly an annual P&L and Balance Sheet. There is also a mid and long term plan. Within that there would be revenue and expenses that are very predictable and easily modelled. Above that there are some more difficult variables like whether we're in UEFA comps on the football side and whether we're about to upgrade sponsorship. Levy made a massive statement when he told us that the stadium build was mutually exclusive to the football operational side. He also said that the intention was to have CL revenues by the time we opened the stadium. We had that for 2 or 3 years prior to the stadium.

Spurs set a worldwide record in 2018 of £113m and followed that up with £69m, the year later. So £182m of profit over 2 years and something like £35m kindly donated to HMRC as tax. We then go into crazy spend mode and record a loss of way over £50m the year after. Fans just assumed it was just the CL monies. Absolutely not.

My strong belief is that if we had been able to smooth this graph, history could have been way less painful. That would have meant a better forecasting model obviously recalibrated each year. We needed player investment (transfers and salaries) as Poch's squad started to peak in 2017. That's when we had squad burnout. That's when we had injury build-up, especially soft tissue. That's when we had prime players needing fair salaries for their disposition as PL players. Instead, in COVID we were spending where other clubs were tightening their belts. We still couldn't buy quality though.

Best example is Toby
2015 - 5 year contract where he could earn up to £80k per week with bonuses. Became one of truly eite defenders in Europe.
Spurs leave him on £80k per week for 4 years of that contract
Dec 2019 - offers him a contract renewal until 2023, where he can earn up to £180k per week.
Toby gone in 2021.

So for all of our peak Toby years he was disenfranchised watching guys in the league at his level getting 2 or 3 times more salary than him. We were giving £35m to HMRC instead.

Perhaps real answer here is that there was no tangible MY forecast. Perhaps we were just being reactive and not proactive in the way the club was being financially modelled. The multi-year parameters when loaded together look very questionable. They look really sub-optimal. They needed smoothing out.

But it’s still all supposition. No one has any idea of what the financial forecasting was. We are not a publicly traded company so that level of detail is not visible.
And re Levy saying the stadium build would not impact the footballing spend - he did say that initially but then he corrected that later and made clear that it might not be so easy to ringfence a transfer budget.

 

[DubSpur]

So in the THFC business model there is clearly an annual P&L and Balance Sheet. There is also a mid and long term plan. Within that there would be revenue and expenses that are very predictable and easily modelled. Above that there are some more difficult variables like whether we're in UEFA comps on the football side and whether we're about to upgrade sponsorship. Levy made a massive statement when he told us that the stadium build was mutually exclusive to the football operational side. He also said that the intention was to have CL revenues by the time we opened the stadium. We had that for 2 or 3 years prior to the stadium.

Spurs set a worldwide record in 2018 of £113m and followed that up with £69m, the year later. So £182m of profit over 2 years and something like £35m kindly donated to HMRC as tax. We then go into crazy spend mode and record a loss of way over £50m the year after. Fans just assumed it was just the CL monies. Absolutely not.

My strong belief is that if we had been able to smooth this graph, history could have been way less painful. That would have meant a better forecasting model obviously recalibrated each year. We needed player investment (transfers and salaries) as Poch's squad started to peak in 2017. That's when we had squad burnout. That's when we had injury build-up, especially soft tissue. That's when we had prime players needing fair salaries for their disposition as PL players. Instead, in COVID we were spending where other clubs were tightening their belts. We still couldn't buy quality though.

Best example is Toby
2015 - 5 year contract where he could earn up to £80k per week with bonuses. Became one of truly eite defenders in Europe.
Spurs leave him on £80k per week for 4 years of that contract
Dec 2019 - offers him a contract renewal until 2023, where he can earn up to £180k per week.
Toby gone in 2021.

So for all of our peak Toby years he was disenfranchised watching guys in the league at his level getting 2 or 3 times more salary than him. We were giving £35m to HMRC instead.

Perhaps real answer here is that there was no tangible MY forecast. Perhaps we were just being reactive and not proactive in the way the club was being financially modelled. The multi-year parameters when loaded together look very questionable. They look really sub-optimal. They needed smoothing out.

There's a lot of unknowns to judge any of this off. We were taking on massive loans to finance the stadium. There could've been demands from the bank to show profitability etc in order to get the loans we did and at the interest rates we did. Once the loans were sorted it might have allowed us to loosen the strings a bit. Plus didn't ENIC inject some cash around that stage?