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.