If it hadn’t been for the football, Daniel Levy would be regarded as one of the great club executives. He oversaw the construction of what is widely regarded as the best club stadium in England. Tottenham’s training ground is one of the best in Europe. He kept costs low. He has diversified the business, so the club hosts NFL, rugby, boxing, monster trucks and major concerts. He even had the chutzpah to get Tottenham into Super League conversations, despite the fact they haven’t won the league since 1961. Yet over the past year, Levy has faced constant fan protests.
The news he had stepped down on Thursday came as a shock, although in retrospect there is perhaps a suggestion that he could feel the end approaching. In February he said “all options are open” in response to fan demands for his resignation. Last month, in a rare extended interview, given to Gary Neville, he remarked: “When I’m not here I’m sure I’ll get the credit,” a suggestion perhaps he was beginning to contemplate his legacy. He is 63 and missed the Uefa Super Cup final to help his daughter settle in at university in the US, perhaps an indication of somebody beginning to reassess their life priorities.
Tottenham, similarly, had begun to restructure. The former Arsenal executive Vinai Venkatesham was appointed as CEO in the summer, and it was announced in March that Peter Charrington, a director of Enic, which owns 86.91% of the club, would be joining the board. Charrington now becomes nonexecutive chair. To what extent Levy was a willing participant in what looks now like succession planning is unclear, but the suspicion is there has been a conscious desire for a new approach from the Lewis family, which owns Enic, although Levy and his family have a 29.88% stake. That Levy had a financial stake in the club and so an interest in making it as profitable as possible has, along with the fact he was the best-paid Premier League chair, been a constant a bugbear for fans whose focus, understandably, is on the pitch.
It is one of the curses of football’s executive classes that fans still care about trivialities such as winning the trophies and playing the game well, and one of the great ironies of the modern Premier League that before every match at Tottenham a video montage of highlights of the club’s history is played to stirring music and Danny Blanchflower’s dictum that the game is about glory. And then out run a team representing a club with a 42% wages-to-turnover ratio.
To an extent that caution was forced on Levy by circumstance. White Hart Lane had to be upgraded and Levy has done that, while keeping the club in their traditional home. Managing that in London, where land is so scarce and so expensive, is not an achievement to be dismissed. The cost, though, was at least £1bn which, as Arsenal found when they moved to the Emirates, necessarily restricts expenditure in other areas.
Caution in the transfer market, though, allied to rising ticket prices, has led to fan frustration. In Levy’s 24 years at the club, Spurs reached 16 semi-finals and seven finals, twice finished third in the league and once second, but won only the League Cup in 2008 and the Europa League last season. Might they have collected more silverware with even a slightly more aggressive transfer strategy? Profitability and sustainability regulations have not been what has constrained them.
There have been two major frustrations. First, the £85m fee secured for Gareth Bale from Real Madrid was not well invested. Worse, though, was perhaps what happened after 2017-18 when Tottenham finished in the top three for a third consecutive season. They moved into the new stadium towards the end of the following season and reached the Champions League final. But the apparent positivity masked the staleness that had set in. Spurs had made no signings in the summer of 2018 and, just as significantly, failed to sell the players Mauricio Pochettino felt needed replacing. The result was they started their first full season in the new stadium badly, leading to Pochettino’s dismissal in November. The appointment of José Mourinho may have been a rare instance of Levy making an overtly ambitious move but it was one he misjudged, as though he were doing what it seemed like a big club would do rather than what was necessary.
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The sense that Tottenham had come so close under Pochettino has inevitably affected perceptions of what has followed. What if Levy had been more prepared to take a risk? What if he had spent better? When success did finally return after 17 years it was in circumstances that made it very hard for Levy to take credit: he had so lost faith in Ange Postecoglou, the manager he had appointed, that he sacked him 16 days later.
That’s what makes his legacy so hard to assess. The vision Levy laid out to Neville was overtly commercial, and by those criteria he succeeded at Tottenham. They were profitable in 13 of the 15 seasons before the stadium move and, while the current debt of £850m is significant, it is understandable: as Levy said, the stadium is the envy of many other clubs.
But a football club is not just a commercial enterprise. At some point the actual football matters. Some may even argue it’s the point. And on that, Levy scores rather less highly.
