Daniel Levy - Former Chairman

[Ace Face]

I realise that. But your initial post highlighted poor officiating as a potential reason for costing us points, but every team (other than Arsenal) can point to that.

Can you blame DL and ENIC for two consecutive seasons disrupted by injuries to most of our key players?

Admittedly you could argue that our medical team and facilities are not up to the required standards, which is 100% on them, but that would mostly affect the recovery period and not the actual incidents which was unprecedented on this scale.

And re: our 17th place finish in 24/25, there are certainly mitigating factors there, including injuries.

 

[Gutter Boy]

When you read of all the lawsuits against Triller the owners of Eight Sports makes the alleged sale of his share of the club to them a little bemusing but of course £££££££ wins in the end.

The brickshow America is at the moment, maybe the Chinese company were the ones playing by the book? A lawsuit might be aggressive Trumpian foreign policy, with the Chinese being the ones obeying the rule of law?

 

[Muttley]

Personally, I never felt Levy was a great negotiator at all. It was pretty much spelt out in the Modric and Lloris autobiographies that Levy wasn't looking for quid-pro-quo where both parties feel satisfied with the outcome. Levy seemed to get to that point in any negotiation and move the goal posts. My guess is that approach meant he lost way more than he ever won, not that negotiation should be about winning or losing. It should be about winning and winning. As I said, it's about the quid-pro-quo.

I reckon it was really easy to become disenfranchised working with Spurs on transfers under a Levy regime. I think this was the point @SissokoWasGood (BoL) was inferring above. I know Poch lost the plot with the constant procrastination of Levy doing deals and upseeting the start of every season. We saw with our own eyes the amount of times we had to do major culls as Levy had let the squad get so bloated. We read so many times that we had the money but couldn't make the deal happen. We saw so many times transfer windows where the big clubs were signing 2 or 3 quality additions but we were in the 6-8 range.

I'm actually more excited now about going into transfer windows now that Levy has gone.

 

[Jurgen the German]

Sometimes change for changes sake needs to happen, DL had built up a certain level on animosity (obvious on this thread) that hung over the fan relationship with club, and there were legitimate concerns that he had hit a ceiling with his approach.

That said, the 6 or 7 years, sometimes 10, sometime more, re downward trajectory narrative is vastly overstated.
- We literally were 4th, five seasons ago (2022, 3 years post your 2019 statement)
- We were 5th, three seasons ago
- We were in SF of domestic cup twice, in that same five seasons
- We won the Europa League two seasons ago.

This is inherently the issue with serious football discussion and nuance.
- Tottenham went on an extraordinary run of league results from 04/05 season all the way to 23/24 (19 seasons with only 3 times out top 6)
- Despite Chelsea, City and Saudi Sportswashing Machine coming with money doping, and increased competition from better run clubs and rival of clubs like Villa.
- There always was going to be some drop off post our best manager/team combination in modern era and moving on of the current best player in the world, to paint it as some monumental fudge up is just too simplistic a perspective.
- Covid seriously hurt the club exactly at the point when the stadium was supposed to help

There is too much of a lazy narrative to paint the last 6-10 years or entire ENIC/DL period as a failure.

The last 2 years have been an utter clusterfudge, that is the story (if we had got 5th/6th this year, there would be no narrative re years of decline). The real question is why the last 2 years have gone so bad.
- Why have two manager hires failed to get a grasp on the PL (Jose/Conte never even looked like dropping outside top half)
- Recruitment with a serious nuance, why has the squad managed in both Europa/CL but looked horrid in PL (balance, type of player, physicality, is it a profiling mistake?). To say our recruitment is brick (i.e. bad players) is again OTT, balance and gaps for sure.
- Injuries, this gets swept under the rug every time, but no recruitment strategy, no squad depth model can compensate for 14 injured players, none.
- Why has our model gone from 5th highest spend and punching slightly above our weight to 5th highest spend and performing way below (except in Europe).

Re your two questions (even though not aimed at me)
- The club prioritized CL finishes because the financial model required it (perhaps our new/old owners will change this, lets see)
- Keeping Levy with same set of rules/controls (put in place by same owners we currently have) in place made no sense. The only model in which keeping him made sense was with more delegation of authority and him focusing on working with FA/UEFA (just like Dein used to get Scum favours) and the overall commercial side and continued development of Tottenham.

It’s neither overstated nor a lazy narrative. The Europa League triumph was a fantastic achievement and something every Spurs fan will cherish. However, the league remains the ultimate barometer of a club’s progress, or lack thereof, because it reflects performance over 38 games rather than a handful of knockout matches.

Since reaching the Champions League final in 2018/19, our league finishes have been 6th, 7th, 4th, 8th, 5th, 17th and 17th. While there have been occasional highs along the way, the overall trend is difficult to ignore. The trajectory has been downward for a number of years, culminating in our worst league finish in decades.

For me, the aim should never be to choose between league consistency and trophy success. We should be striving for both. The best-run clubs are capable of challenging for honours while remaining competitive in the league year after year. Winning the Europa League was a major positive, but it shouldn't completely overshadow what has been a sustained decline in our league performances.

 

[Jurgen the German]

Can you blame DL and ENIC for two consecutive seasons disrupted by injuries to most of our key players?

Admittedly you could argue that our medical team and facilities are not up to the required standards, which is 100% on them, but that would mostly affect the recovery period and not the actual incidents which was unprecedented on this scale.

And re: our 17th place finish in 24/25, there are certainly mitigating factors there, including injuries.

Not directly, no. No chairman or owner can prevent a player from pulling a hamstring or suffering an impact injury.

However, if we're talking about two consecutive seasons being heavily disrupted by injuries, then it's fair to ask questions of the club's infrastructure. The ownership is ultimately responsible for providing the facilities, medical department, sports science staff, conditioning programmes, recovery processes and overall environment that are designed to minimise injury risk and maximise player availability.

You can't have it both ways. If the club is praised for having world-class facilities and being at the forefront of sports science, then it also has to be scrutinised when injuries become a recurring issue over an extended period. At some point, it becomes more than just bad luck.

I'm not saying Levy and ENIC are personally responsible for every injury, but they are responsible for appointing the people, investing in the resources and overseeing the structures that are meant to keep players fit and available. If key players are repeatedly breaking down over multiple seasons, it's reasonable to ask whether the club is doing everything it can to address the problem.

 

[Raziel]

It’s neither overstated nor a lazy narrative. The Europa League triumph was a fantastic achievement and something every Spurs fan will cherish. However, the league remains the ultimate barometer of a club’s progress, or lack thereof, because it reflects performance over 38 games rather than a handful of knockout matches.

Since reaching the Champions League final in 2018/19, our league finishes have been 6th, 7th, 4th, 8th, 5th, 17th and 17th. While there have been occasional highs along the way, the overall trend is difficult to ignore. The trajectory has been downward for a number of years, culminating in our worst league finish in decades.

For me, the aim should never be to choose between league consistency and trophy success. We should be striving for both. The best-run clubs are capable of challenging for honours while remaining competitive in the league year after year. Winning the Europa League was a major positive, but it shouldn't completely overshadow what has been a sustained decline in our league performances.

It is mate, literally the last 5 years include a 4th and a 5th (still CL finish), which if you take out the 16-19 seasons, would still rank as matching our best results in 36 years, the last time we did better than 4th/5th outside of that 3 season run, is 89/90, so to claim 4th & 5th are some grand fall off just isn't real. It's not even a reversion to mean.

I don't disagree with striving for more, we absolutely should, but to be clear I think Spurs fans have some alternate reality some days
- The ENIC era hasn't been some disaster that dragged the club down from some heights
- Spurs has 18 major trophies in 145 years, barely an average of >1 trophy a decade, again outside of a small period of time, not a club that competes at the very top tier.

16-19 is an overachievement, a moment in time, we lack the squad or resources to turn it in every season without a whole lot going right, and the media gives us zero credit for that. Liverpool spent 400M on a title winning squad and came 5th, Chelsea has spent uncountable money and came 10th, but if we don't get better than 4th, we have fallen?

And to be 100% clear, the last 2 seasons are a disaster, see my earlier post, and there should be a review, accountability, changes, all the things that it deserves, but the 6-9 year drop off isn't real.

If you want a lazy/simple answer with no nuance, we sold Son and Kane, and that's the only fudging difference between the team coming 4th and 17th ..

 

[Jurgen the German]

It is mate, literally the last 5 years include a 4th and a 5th (still CL finish), which if you take out the 16-19 seasons, would still rank as matching our best results in 36 years, the last time we did better than 4th/5th outside of that 3 season run, is 89/90, so to claim 4th & 5th are some grand fall off just isn't real. It's not even a reversion to mean.

I don't disagree with striving for more, we absolutely should, but to be clear I think Spurs fans have some alternate reality some days
- The ENIC era hasn't been some disaster that dragged the club down from some heights
- Spurs has 18 major trophies in 145 years, barely an average of >1 trophy a decade, again outside of a small period of time, not a club that competes at the very top tier.

16-19 is an overachievement, a moment in time, we lack the squad or resources to turn it in every season without a whole lot going right, and the media gives us zero credit for that. Liverpool spent 400M on a title winning squad and came 5th, Chelsea has spent uncountable money and came 10th, but if we don't get better than 4th, we have fallen?

And to be 100% clear, the last 2 seasons are a disaster, see my earlier post, and there should be a review, accountability, changes, all the things that it deserves, but the 6-9 year drop off isn't real.

If you want a lazy/simple answer with no nuance, we sold Son and Kane, and that's the only fudging difference between the team coming 4th and 17th ..

If you look at it another way, we've managed just one top-four finish in the last seven seasons, and we even missed out on Champions League qualification in a season where fifth place would have been enough.

If our finishes had been something like 4th, 5th, 5th, 6th, 5th, 6th and so on, then I'd agree there would be a strong argument that we'd remained consistently competitive. But that's not what the league table shows. Instead, it points to a pattern of inconsistency, including two bottom-half finishes.

To put that into perspective, over that period we've actually finished in the bottom half of the table more often than we've finished in the top four. That's not the profile of a club steadily progressing or consistently competing at the highest level; it's the profile of a club that has become increasingly unpredictable from one season to the next.

 

[thfcsteff]

Is that true? Surely the same could be put the other way, like those who can't let Frank go without him being hated.

I just think people are discussing the past as they see it TBF

I think time will level out the Frank reactions. He has been the unfortunate bearer of a burden he should never have shouldered. I can certainly say my personal responses through the season were not just practical but over-emotional (I see @Bishop waving from afar LOL) when the truth is yes, he did a poor job and this was never the right job for him given the stability and expectation he came from versus the instability and huge demands we carried.
Besides consistently not liking the job he did, I have always been consistent on feeling he was shafted by the churn above him so soon after arrival.

 

[thfcsteff]

Not to respond for him but there have been lots of reports over the years of rival chairman disliking doing business with us. Even Simon Jordan who calls him a friend has mentioned that he preferred not doing business with Levy because of how difficult he was. Fergie said the same, Analus also and there have been many mentions over the years and I don't believe these people were talking purely about the price but more so his negotiating stance.

Yes being hard headed about the price you want for a player can be beneficial to the headline figure, but if that then means that sale takes all summer to happen (Berbatov, Kane, Modric) it gives little time for the replacement's also extended negotiations and for that player to bed into the squad. It also limited our ability to sell our unwanted players because everyone knew our pricing was quite unreasonable.

Absolutely true.

 

[robp135]

The brickshow America is at the moment, maybe the Chinese company were the ones playing by the book? A lawsuit might be aggressive Trumpian foreign policy, with the Chinese being the ones obeying the rule of law?

Most of the lawsuits came about when Biden was in office.

 

[robp135]

Not to respond for him but there have been lots of reports over the years of rival chairman disliking doing business with us. Even Simon Jordan who calls him a friend has mentioned that he preferred not doing business with Levy because of how difficult he was. Fergie said the same, Analus also and there have been many mentions over the years and I don't believe these people were talking purely about the price but more so his negotiating stance.

Yes being hard headed about the price you want for a player can be beneficial to the headline figure, but if that then means that sale takes all summer to happen (Berbatov, Kane, Modric) it gives little time for the replacement's also extended negotiations and for that player to bed into the squad. It also limited our ability to sell our unwanted players because everyone knew our pricing was quite unreasonable.

I think there was a point in time where we were on the outside looking in at the bigger clubs and Levy represented us well on those negotiations. Not allowing us to be bullied. Similar to the methods that Brighton are using now. How you handle one negotiation will impact your reputation and set the precedent for the future. But once we effectively became on of those clubs, we never operated the way they did. The other clubs, the agents etc they want to work with Arsenal, United, Liverpool, City, Chelsea because they don't mess around. They generally pay both the club and the player close to what they are asking for outside a few exceptions and the deal gets done quickly al]owing the selling club to reinvest.