For almost 25 years, everything at Spurs revolved around their chairman - his sudden recent departure was always likely to cause shockwaves
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For almost a quarter of a century, everything at Tottenham Hotspur revolved around Daniel Levy. He ran the club with total knowledge, total control, and his word was always final.
But when Levy was sacked on September 4, he wasn’t even allowed into the training centre to retrieve his possessions. Nor was his wife Tracey, who worked at the club until the day Levy was sacked. Their belongings were eventually returned by van.
A separation this sharp is standard practice in the corporate world. It would be the same at any blue-chip company. But it is still a remarkable moment in the world of Premier League football, an instant transformation of status for one of its best-known figures.
That glistening glass and metal training centre in Enfield, opened in 2012, was one of Levy’s biggest achievements at Spurs.
This was a facility worth boasting to the world about, far removed from the club’s rickety old home in Chigwell, Essex. This was where Levy would base himself, and where he would proudly take meetings. Until this month, that is, when the king found himself locked out of his own castle for good.
Daniel Levy at Tottenham’s old training ground in 2004, with then Spurs players Ledley King and Frederic Kanoute (Nick Potts/Getty Images)
Of course, the central fact of the events of early September is that Levy was never quite as much the king of Tottenham Hotspur as he appeared to be. Even if he ran the club like he was an owner (he almost ran it like a founder), true power lay with the Lewis family. And they exercised that power in a brutal, ruthless way on September 4.
Levy is now left out in the cold, bruised, wounded, still with his minority shareholding in Spurs but with no executive voice.
Meanwhile, Tottenham — and by extension the Lewis family — have a hierarchy with a Levy-shaped hole in it that they need to fill.
When Peter Charrington chairs the first meeting of the post-Levy board on Friday, it will mark a historic break with the past 24 years.
Levy’s downfall was so sudden that even he had no idea on that Thursday morning that his tenure at the club was about to end.
It felt like just another week at the start of an international break and came a couple of days after the closing of the summer transfer window.
Tottenham had lost their home game against Bournemouth on the Saturday, but they paraded Netherlands international winger Xavi Simons on the pitch beforehand, his signing from RB Leipzig having been a significant personal triumph for Levy. The chairman had been as involved as ever in Spurs’ transfer business over the prior weeks and months. Losing out to neighbours and arch-rivals Arsenal for Crystal Palace’s England forward Eberechi Eze in late August was painful, but Levy was determined to finish the window strongly, and on its last day, they also signed France striker Randal Kolo Muani on loan from Paris Saint-Germain.
After a long summer, it was time for everyone at Spurs to take a breath.
But then Levy walked into a meeting with Charrington, who the Lewis family had appointed to the board six months before, on what should have been a quiet day.
Instead, one era of Tottenham ended and another began.
However, even if the timing was a shock — not least to Levy himself — this did not come entirely out of the blue either.
The Athletic reported on the night of Levy’s dismissal that the Lewis family had increased their scrutiny of club affairs over the course of 2025, trying to get to the bottom of why exactly Spurs were underperforming on the pitch. Even though last season ended in triumph with victory in the Europa League final, it was a miserable experience in the Premier League. Tottenham looked like a team getting further away from the best sides in the country, rather than closing the gap, as they finished 17th, above only the three relegated clubs. More than six years after the opening of their new stadium, this was not meant to happen.
Tottenham Hotspur Stadium opened in April 2019 (Jose Breton/Getty Images)
So in March, the Lewises appointed Charrington, a veteran private banker and senior partner at their luxury resort brand Nexus, to the board. At the same time, they hired United States-based management consultancy firm Gibb River to go into Tottenham and speak to senior staff about what was going wrong. Why was this football club, with some of the best facilities in the world, no longer competing on the pitch?
This review led to staffing changes that were significant enough on their own terms, even before the departure of Levy. First was the announcement that Vinai Venkatesham would be arriving as chief executive in June, the first time in two decades-plus under the ownership of the Lewis family’s ENIC investment group that Spurs had someone in such a role. Then there was the departure of board member Donna Cullen, a long-standing Levy ally and one of the most influential figures behind the scenes at the club throughout his tenure.
The summer was busy enough anyway, just for football reasons. There was a change in the structure, with chief football officer Scott Munn leaving. There was a change of head coach, with Brentford boss Thomas Frank replacing Ange Postecoglou. There was a demanding transfer window, where Tottenham desperately needed to reinforce their first team. Only once that was done could they make the final and most important move of all.
There was another story in the background this year, aside from debates over whether or not Levy was running Spurs well.
This concerned the future ownership of the club.
It was no secret that during the final years of his chairmanship, Levy was pursuing the idea of selling a stake in Tottenham. The idea, in short, was that he would find a new investor who would buy a big chunk of shares — something along the lines of 10 per cent of the club for £400million. Levy was very open about this, saying in public in 2024 that the operation “requires a significant increase in its equity base”. In private, his pitch to potential investors was that he had built the platform for Spurs and now needed to raise substantial capital for the next phase of their growth.
Such a deal, had it happened, could even have altered the balance of power at the club. New money and a new backer would have given Levy what he was looking for.
Over the course of this year, though, a new theory started to emerge. That there might be a larger investment, not just for a minority stake, but for a new investor or consortium buying out the Lewis family’s majority shareholding. And that under this scenario, Levy might be asked continue to run Tottenham on behalf of a different backer, although well-placed sources have denied these talks ever took place.
Daniel Levy congratulates head coach Ange Postecoglou after May’s Europa League final victory over Manchester United (James Gill/Getty Images)
Clearly, no such deal, whether for a smaller stake or a larger one, ever materialised. And the Lewis family have made clear their own position on this over the course of this month, that the club is not for sale, and the search for fresh external investment is over. Indeed, on Friday afternoon the club announced that they had received and “unequivocally rejected” an expression of interest from a consortium led by Brooklyn Earick.
Now he is out, Levy is stuck in a rare position. His family still own 29.88 per cent of ENIC’s majority shareholding, and therefore roughly 26 per cent of the club. But now that he is off the board, his options are limited. Levy has no control, no decision-making power and no voice. If Levy wanted to attend a game at the stadium that he oversaw the construction, and watch the team he has supported since childhood, you may be more likely to see him in the stands than back in the executive box.