In the away end at the Gtech Community Stadium last Sunday, a small group of Tottenham Hotspur fans tried to get a song going.
It was that old favourite, “Harry Kane, he’s one of our own”, reworked and redirected at the club’s executive chairman Daniel Levy. “Harry Kane,” they began chanting, “he left ’cos of you.”
It died a death, drifting away on the late-summer breeze. It was the first weekend of the new season and, for the vast majority of Tottenham’s travelling fans, it was a day for trying to get over Kane’s departure, embracing a new start under Ange Postecoglou and putting ownership issues to the back of the mind.
The dawn of a new season often has that effect, particularly when the manager radiates positivity, on and off the pitch, rather than the negative tone favoured by some of Ange Postecoglou’s recent predecessors.
Levy might be advised to enjoy this feel-good factor while it lasts. The next wave of dissent never seems far away these days. Whether it is the first or second defeat of the Premier League campaign or a dispiriting end to the summer transfer window, there will be a point when the chairman and the club’s board are brought back into sharper focus and harsher scrutiny.
As everyone knows, it is 15 years since Tottenham last won a trophy, their only one in more than two decades under ENIC’s ownership and Levy’s stewardship.
That does not, as some would characterise it, amount to 15 years of stagnation; for at least a decade — making serious strides on and off the pitch, consistently finishing in the Premier League’s top six, reaching a Champions League final, recruiting smartly and developing talent under Mauricio Pochettino, building developing a state-of-the-art stadium and training ground that were the envy of many more successful clubs — Tottenham’s progress under Levy and ENIC was widely admired.
The problem is the regression, drift and misery over the past four years, hence Kane seeking and eventually finding an escape route to Bayern Munich, a move described by the Tottenham Hotspur Supporters’ Trust (THST) as “a watershed moment, a clear and painful indictment of the on-field development of the club (…) leading to ‘one of our own’ feeling he had no option but to leave.”
It’s a difficult one, that. You could look at it the other way and say the modern football economy is totally rigged and that, in an era when elite players are invariably gobbled up by the clubs at the very top of the food chain sooner rather than later, it is a testament to Tottenham’s performance over the past decade — and indeed to Levy’s intransigence — that they retained Kane’s services until he turned 30, having become the club’s all-time record goalscorer.
Kane has joined Bayern (Photo: CHRISTOF STACHE/AFP via Getty Images)
As an obvious point of comparison, pre-ENIC Tottenham was a mid-table club that not long after their takeover in December 2000 lost its outstanding homegrown talent, Sol Campbell, at the age of 26. To Arsenal. On a free transfer.
Levy was adamant he would not allow Kane to leave on a free transfer, particularly as that came with the risk of losing him to another Premier League club. Securing a deal worth £100million for a 30-year-old, in the final year of a contract he did not wish to renew, seemed like just about the best outcome for Tottenham in a no-win situation.
Then again, that no-win situation has been brought about by… well, not winning. And over the past four years, by not even coming close. That has seen Levy and ENIC accused of lacking the ambition to build on their progress under Pochettino.
For his part, Levy spoke in May of having “made football decisions over recent seasons based on ambition and a desire to bring success to our club” — presumably the appointments of Jose Mourinho and Antonio Conte — “and they have not delivered what we had hoped.”
At the end of the 2018-19 season, in which Tottenham reached the Champions League final and moved to the new stadium, the THST’s annual survey saw 89 per cent of fans express at very least cautious optimism (46 per cent confident, 43 per cent somewhat confident) in ENIC’s long-term strategy for the club.
By the end of last season, that faith had plummeted: seven per cent were very confident in the owners’ long-term strategy, 18 per cent were somewhat confident, 75 per cent were either not so confident or not all confident. Looking to the future, just three per cent stated full confidence in the owners; 48 per cent called for a greater focus on the football side of the business; 25 per cent would welcome new ownership if a “credible” alternative emerged; 23 per cent wanted ENIC to sell immediately; one per cent said none of the above.
“There is a section of the support that is very firmly ‘They need to go’,” says THST member and former co-chair Martin Cloake. “Others feel that is extreme and are proud that we reached the Champions League final and challenged for the Premier League without being owned by a nation-state. They’re worried about what might come next if the club was sold. Some supporters don’t care what comes next. They just want a change.”
Cloake has long felt conflicted about that. He doesn’t want his club owned by a state, particularly not one with what he calls “dubious policies”. He knows there are many worse or less appealing owners out there, but increasingly he doubts whether Levy and ENIC can “take the club much further”.
At the same time, he questions the decision-making and the culture within the club — not just on football matters but on ticket prices and much more. He has campaigned for years for Tottenham to offer more transparency and better communication. He wants the club to learn from its mistakes but feels they all too rarely acknowledge them.
The past decade shows it has still just about been possible for a club of Tottenham’s size to compete for the biggest prizes over a period of three or four years, but only if their decision-making is extremely good. For several years, which took them so close to glory under Pochettino, it really was. Lately — not just since the Champions League final in 2019 but arguably for a year or two before that, as momentum began to slow — Tottenham’s decisions (which has often meant Levy’s decisions) have repeatedly let them down.
From a position of strength, they seemed either unwilling or unable to gamble in pursuit of success. From a consequently weakened position, perhaps the worst thing Levy did was to let blind ambition — for the business, certainly, but also for the team — erode what had been previously been a clear vision of what Tottenham were trying to be.
The Postecoglou appointment represents a reset, far more in keeping with Levy’s much-derided “DNA” comment before he hired Nuno Espirito Santo and then Conte. But the problem with resets is that, again, they are usually made from a position of weakness; Tottenham finished eighth last season, their lowest placing in 14 years, and have lost their outstanding player and talisman. It is a “trust the process” appointment. It has to be — and the fans are generally on board with it.
The problem is that trust in the club’s ownership has dwindled. It isn’t just the football strategy. It’s the hike in ticket prices (the subject of a planned pre-match protest on Saturday). It’s the European Super League debacle a few years back. It’s a perceived lack of transparency and communication (a familiar complaint among fans of many Premier League clubs). It’s the Fabio Paratici affair earlier this year, which raised serious questions about the Tottenham hierarchy’s judgment. It’s the insider-trading accusations faced by Joe Lewis, the 86-year-old billionaire founder of ENIC, whose legal team say U.S. prosecutors have made an “egregious” mistake.
In the past, there has been a desire to shift the focus away from Levy — to remind people that, while the chairman might be the public face of the Tottenham hierarchy, “Mr Lewis” was the club’s owner.
Lewis is no longer a “person with significant control” (Photo: Catherine Ivill/AMA/Corbis via Getty Images)
That is no longer the case. Tottenham stated last month that Lewis “ceased to be a person with significant control of the club” last October and that ENIC was now being managed by two independent trustees (Bahamian lawyer Bryan Glinton and British solicitor Katie Booth). More than ever, Levy, whom Lewis appointed to run the club on a day-to-day basis in 2001, is the visible, recognisable face of the ownership.
The Lewis situation intensifies the spotlight on the ownership and, inevitably, on the man running the shop. So too, in a different way, does the change of manager. Mourinho and Conte were big personalities who, for better and frequently for worse, dominated the day-to-day narrative surrounding Tottenham; Postecoglou is a big personality too, but one who neither has nor covets the same media profile. Perhaps Levy will welcome that; at least the former Celtic manager is not the type to chuck metaphorical hand grenades towards the boardroom.
Then there is the loss of Kane. Postecoglou will try to bridge the goalscoring deficit by combining the talents of Son Heung-min, Richarlison, James Maddison, Dejan Kulusevski and Alejo Veliz (and potentially Gift Orban if a deal goes through) with a more attack-minded approach, but the England captain’s departure leaves something of a void in a wider sense too. If that void is not filled — in the goalscoring column, in hearts and minds — there is no doubt who will take the flak for it.
Pep Guardiola famously referred to Tottenham as “the Harry Kane team” back in 2017, such was his admiration for the forward. It wasn’t true at that stage, when Spurs were performing so well under Pochettino, but they became so; the more Levy put his faith in managers who were expected to elevate the club to a higher level, the more they found themselves relying on Kane to stop them sliding down the table.
It isn’t the Harry Kane team now. More than ever, perhaps, it is the Daniel Levy club. There have been times when Tottenham have tried hard to dispel that perception — that of “the Daniel show”, as one source described the operation before the appointment of Paratici in 2021, never quite imagining that the Italian’s time as managing director of football would be so brief and so turbulent.
Scott Munn, formerly of City Football Group, is due to start work as chief football officer shortly, but that unwanted perception of “the Daniel show” persists. On the pitch, at the training ground, in the offices, even now in the boardroom, so many of the other important figures have moved on — and so many others have come and gone without leaving a trace. During a period of upheaval, Levy has been and still is a rare constant.
That continuity should be a good thing. Arguably it has been. There are clubs which have declined or flirted with disaster under their current ownership. Tottenham, despite the lack of silverware, are certainly not one of those.
But the new stadium was supposed to catapult Tottenham into the highest echelon of clubs and, as with Arsenal’s move more than a decade earlier, it hasn’t brought the anticipated dividends — partly, in both cases, because of unforeseen developments elsewhere. It has created the impression of a club standing still while the sport changes around them. And it has created a thirst for revolution when what Tottenham really need is to get back, slowly but surely, to what they were doing well before.
(Photo: John Walton/PA Images via Getty Images)
