Levy/ENIC Discussion in here!

[KingNothing]

Rewatched the Poch era game where we beat Chelsea 5-1.

My word we were good. The quality of play far exceeds anything we’ve had for a very long time and it made me sad.

Dembele as we all know was truly special.

I wish Thomas Frank the best of luck. We’re going to have to sign a lot of new quality players to get back to that level.

Do you mean the 5-3 win at the Lane in 2014-15 when we finished 5th? Or the 3-1 win at Wembley in 2018-19 when we finished 4th?

We finished 5th in Ange's first season. I don't believe we need to sign a lot of new quality players to get back to get back to that level. In my opinion, Mbeumo or Bakayoko, and a left back would be nice.

 

[animalmom]

Yes but also these were two obligated deals.

Whoa.

 

[muppetman]

I can see that Levy's messaging that Spurs are poor and so the only way to compete is to grow our own top players is back in.

It's a choice to do it this way, not a necessity.

 

[alfie103]

I can see that Levy's messaging that Spurs are poor and so the only way to compete is to grow our own top players is back in.

It's a choice to do it this way, not a necessity.

Where is that?

 

[muppetman]

Where is that?

I've seen plenty of posts about the need to grow our own. Post in the Tel thread just now saying "we know we can't buy a top forward" or similar.

I think we can afford to, we just choose not to and so hope that in a season or two Tel grows into a top player. That doesn't help us right now though.

 

[eppingyid]

Darren Lewis from the mirror was on talksport yesterday. He was taking about a piece on levy in the Sunday times by Tom Allnutt. Not sure if anyone can get the article but from the bits he mentioned he said levy can’t let go and has to be involved in everything

 

[Jase]

Darren Lewis from the mirror was on talksport yesterday. He was taking about a piece on levy in the Sunday times by Tom Allnutt. Not sure if anyone can get the article but from the bits he mentioned he said levy can’t let go and has to be involved in everything

TBF I could've written that.

 

[alfie103]

I've seen plenty of posts about the need to grow our own. Post in the Tel thread just now saying "we know we can't buy a top forward" or similar.

I think we can afford to, we just choose not to and so hope that in a season or two Tel grows into a top player. That doesn't help us right now though.

Oh yes, you are 100% correct. Any excuse for the bald ****.

 

[southlondonyiddo]

I hope we don't fall for the new manager line where a change in manager is all we needed and all the blame gets shoved onto the previous manager. We all know who the main problem is.

Come on mate, the last manager was absolutely hopeless and tactically inept

He was so lucky to win that cup and the players must have taken it upon themselves to play completely differently in Europe

The next cab off the rank will be so much better and a proper manager

 

[he is you know!]

Accessibility LinksSkip to content

Obsessive taskmaster or misunderstood visionary: who is real Daniel Levy?
The Tottenham Hotspur chairman is one of the game’s most demanding, with little interest in small talk and plenty of time spent on the training ground
Collage of three men in suits in front of Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
Tom Allnutt
, Football Reporter
Saturday June 14 2025, 5.57pm, The Sunday Times
Even for Daniel Levy, it has been a busy month: 23 days, two managers, one trophy. Another summer of change.

Those fans calling for Levy to resign in January were dancing down the High Road in May, after Spurs and Ange Postecoglou gave them the night of their lives in that Europa League final in Bilbao and the second trophy of Levy’s 24-year tenure.

Levy has rolled the dice again by sacking Postecoglou, the 59-year-old paying the price for a record 22 defeats in the Premier League, and turning to Brentford’s Thomas Frank. As the longest-serving chairman in the division, Levy’s legacy will be shaped by Frank’s success or failure. So who is the real Daniel Levy? How does he make these decisions? And after hiring his fifth permanent Tottenham head coach in six years, will he finally be proved right?

Daniel Levy and Ange Postecoglou shaking hands after the UEFA Europa League Final.
Levy greets Postecoglou after Tottenham won the Europa League last month but the head coach was sacked 16 days later
RYAN PIERSE/GETTY
Levy’s relationship with players and managers
Levy has appointed plenty of executives with the idea of stepping back on football issues but he is still involved in every area at Spurs. On transfers, Levy is there for the early recruitment meetings, when the sporting director Johan Lange and head of scouting Rob Mackenzie discuss targets for a certain position; the screening process, when targets are whittled down; and the follow-up meeting, when two or three options are presented to the head coach, who gives his order of preference.

With a first choice identified, Levy works on the negotiations, like in January, when a block in talks left Antonin Kinsky’s agent sitting in a petrol station in Prague on New Year’s Eve, prompting Levy to fly out early on New Year’s Day and strike a deal. Even at the last stage, Levy is across the final details, including a player’s medical, when he is emailed the results and knows when it finishes so he can be there at The Lodge, the club’s hotel next to the training ground, to welcome his new signing with a handshake.

Advertisement
In an interview with Varsity magazine, published in January 2020, Levy said being a chairman of a football club was like “running lots of different businesses” and he has his finger in every Spurs pie, from the academy and the women’s team, to the commercial and catering departments. He holds monthly meetings with staff in charge, where previous targets are checked and new ones issued. Levy’s environment is always demanding. “He’s a taskmaster, it’s not on his mind to make people feel good about things,” one long-time colleague said. “If you do a deal, he’s more like, ‘OK that’s great, but can we also do this?’ ”

For players and coaches, Levy keeps more of a distance and he is proud of his personal rule to stay out of the dressing room. Still, he is a visible presence around the training ground, where he spends more of his working days now than at the stadium and holds one-to-one meetings with players in his office. He discussed Postecoglou with senior players before the Europa League final while in the Amazon All or Nothing documentary, released in 2020, Levy holds crisis talks with Tanguy Ndombele, his underperforming £55million signing from Lyon. “OK, so what’s not working?” Levy says.

Mauricio Pochettino and Daniel Levy celebrating after a soccer match.
Pochettino for a while enjoyed a close relationship with Levy, especially after reaching the Champions League final in 2019
GETTY
With managers, that contact has depended more on results and relationships. Communication with Postecoglou was minimal during the final weeks of last season, even if Levy and Postecoglou saw each other most days at breakfast at the training ground and were in touch on WhatsApp. In contrast, Mauricio Pochettino received regular visits from Levy for brief chats after games while at the training ground; Pochettino once listened to Levy recommend that David Bentley, the former Spurs midfielder, talk to the club’s youngsters about staying focused on football, a suggestion Pochettino declined. “A lot of fans complain about their owners being too distant,” one Spurs employee said. “Daniel’s certainly not that. He’s an active chairman in all ways.”

Levy insists that his tenacity stems from a genuine love for the club, instilled ever since his great uncle took him to watch his first game at White Hart Lane against QPR aged “seven or eight”, when he says he wore a “huge rosette”, ate “hotdogs” and swung “one of those rattles”. But talk to those who know Levy and a word that comes up again and again is also “perfectionist”, someone for whom delegation has never come naturally. His obsession with the building of Tottenham’s new stadium gave Levy “sleepless nights”; he had cameras installed so he could watch the construction live at home and email staff with concerns. “He’s addicted to it,” another source, who worked under Levy for several years, said. The football or the business? “The job. He lives and breathes all of it.”

The Mayor of London, an NFL executive, and Tottenham Hotspur's chairman tour the construction site of the new White Hart Lane Stadium.
Levy had sleepless nights as Tottenham’s stadium was being built. Here he is with London mayor Sadiq Khan and NFL executive vice-president Mark Waller
REX SHUTTERSTOCK
Yet Levy’s all-action style inside Tottenham jars with his reluctance to engage outside the club, which creates an absence of accountability. “There’s never any defending of the club or the club defending itself, it seems to me, which makes it even more difficult,” Postecoglou said in April. Levy’s decision not to add his comment or name to the statement regarding Postecoglou’s departure was noteworthy, not least because they are curated after an initial meeting, which Levy attends, and published after a final draft, which Levy approves. It is believed the idea was to take emotion out of the announcement but to fans, Levy’s silence looked like hiding. A club spokesperson said comment from Levy wasn’t appropriate due to the collective nature of the decision made by the football management group.

Advertisement
Levy’s personality and judge of character
By his own admission, Levy has never enjoyed the limelight. He can be “reserved” and “awkward” and “doesn’t engage a room”. Yet those loyal to him insist his difficulty with small talk is often mistaken for rudeness: “If he walks past you and doesn’t say hello, he’s not being rude. He just has his mind on other things.” Levy has rarely given interviews — “I remain dignified and won’t comment,” he told the Cambridge Union in 2023 — and has addressed the players as a group on only a few occasions, like when Tottenham first qualified for the Champions League in 2010 and at the players’ party at the Carlton Hotel after Spurs won the Europa League. Wearing a white Tottenham polo shirt, Levy took the microphone and yelled “We’re champions!” before insisting the triumph would set them on the “road back to the very top”.

To make it happen, some believe Levy needs to surround himself with experienced football executives, rather than the intelligent but like-minded business brains he has relied on for so long. Donna-Maria Cullen, one of Levy’s closest advisers and a key part of the stadium project, has stepped down from the board in a move believed to have been instigated by the Joe Lewis family trust, which was aimed at shaking up the hierarchy. Vinai Venkatesham, the former Arsenal director, started work as Tottenham’s new chief executive this month. A club spokesperson said Cullen stepping back was her own decision.

Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London, visits Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
Cullen, second left, was one of Levy’s key advisors but has now stepped down from the board
SHUTTERSTOCK EDITORIAL
Lange, Levy’s latest technical director and an ally of Frank’s, is expected to stay but is from the data school of scouting, rather than those who lean on connections and instincts to find players. Lange and Frank have known each other for 20 years and worked together in their native Denmark. Scott Munn is expected to leave, two years after Levy made him chief football officer. Munn has been proactive in making changes, to the medical department in particular, but “lacks football acumen”, according to insiders, who said Munn has “barely been seen” in recent months. Munn’s changes to the medical staff, including replacing Tottenham’s head of medicine, head of sports science and head of nutrition last year, failed to bring improvements with injuries last season.

Amid the churn, Levy has also failed to spot or promote some of the best football minds. Michael Edwards, Liverpool’s visionary sporting director and now chief executive, was an analyst at Spurs under Harry Redknapp while John McDermott, now the technical director for England, was Pochettino’s trusted academy chief. Damien Comolli, one of Levy’s first directors of football, has just been appointed general manager at Juventus and Paul Barber, who first worked under Levy in 2005, has become one of the most respected chief executives at Brighton & Hove Albion. In an interview with The Times in 2023, Barber said Levy was “challenging, demanding, at times unreasonable, but very much for the good of the club.”

Levy the survivor and deal-maker
One of Levy’s favourite stories relates to a parents’ evening he remembers at school, when the head teacher told his parents he should leave because he “wasn’t going to make it”. He says his reaction was to decide he would never be beaten and he subsequently got As in his exams and went to Cambridge University, where he graduated with a first in land economy.

Advertisement
That Levy sees that tale as fundamental to his character is instructive. After university, Levy worked in investment banking and then ran several different companies, before selling the idea of investing in football clubs to Lewis, a family friend, with ENIC. When Levy took charge in 2001, Tottenham was valued at £80million while the club’s present valuation is closer to £3billion, turbocharged by a state-of-the-art training ground in Enfield, world-class stadium and regular appearances in the Champions League. In January, Deloitte’s Football Money League calculated that Spurs, with €615million (about £523million) of revenue in 2023-24, were the ninth richest club in the world.

Levy’s conviction that his job is to protect Tottenham’s interests and ensure the club is financially self-sustainable lies behind his stringent approach to spending. One Premier League club has imposed a near-complete ban on transfer dealings with Spurs, such has been the infuriation with Levy’s negotiating tactics, while Sir Alex Ferguson, after paying £30.75million to sign Dimitar Berbatov in 2008, said dealing with Levy was “more painful than my hip operation”. Levy has become convinced that Tottenham’s most expensive signings — such as Ndombele, Giovani Lo Celso, Moussa Sissoko — and managers — José Mourinho and Antonio Conte — have not been their best. Tottenham’s spend on wages as a proportion of their revenue is the lowest in the Premier League.

Yet at least one former Spurs manager felt the transfer window was Levy’s favourite part of the job, a throwback perhaps to his days in retail and investment banking, when a deal was not so much something to be negotiated but won. Sporting directors bemoan how a transfer with Levy is never closed and while there have been plenty of hits — Luka Modric (£16.5million from Dinamo Zagreb), Gareth Bale (£10million from Southampton) and Dele Alli (£5million from MK Dons) among them — Luis Suarez, Sadio Mané and Bruno Fernandes are among the many Levy swerved. Rivals have also got smart. When Luis Díaz left Porto in January 2022, Levy negotiated a lower selling price before Liverpool matched Tottenham’s offer and hijacked the deal. “He makes things difficult for people,” a source said. “And that reputation affects the whole club.”

Man holding a Jacksonville Jaguars helmet at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium has been used for Jacksonville Jaguars NFL matches
PA
Levy’s vision and priorities
As an innovator, Levy has often been overlooked. Tottenham’s 63,000-seat stadium has been a market leader for its corporate reach as a multi-purpose arena that hosts NFL games on its retractable pitch, go-karting backed by Formula 1 and music concerts from the likes of Lady Gaga and, this summer, Beyoncé. Inside the game, Levy has spoken positively about the chance of cup matches being staged abroad, while during the pandemic, he led the way among owners in the search for solutions around testing in stadiums. “There’s this idea of him as just a numbers guy, with a focus on Tottenham, but it couldn’t be further from the truth,” says an American associate of Levy’s, who has worked with Spurs in the past. “He has a real global vision of the game.” Even in the early 2000s, Levy was one of the first executives to put his faith in sporting directors.

Many Tottenham fans would say that global, corporate-first vision has seen Levy, the highest paid director in the Premier League with a salary of £3.7million, take his eye off winning consistently on the pitch. During the 2018-19 season when Tottenham reached the Champions League final, there were doubts about the commissioning of the Amazon documentary given Pochettino’s future was already uncertain, with Levy warned about agreeing to a “documentary about a divorce”. He was in awe of Pochettino’s successors, Mourinho and Conte, and in thrall to the European Super League, to which Tottenham were signed-up members. Last year, in the hunt for higher match-day revenues, Spurs announced they would be scrapping the concession awarded to new senior season-ticket holders from next season, a decision the club’s Supporters Trust described as “disgraceful”.

Advertisement
Tottenham Hotspur fans protest against Daniel Levy.
Tottenham supporters have railed against Levy over the scrapping of season-ticket concessions and the club’s poor league form last season
REUTERS
Some at Tottenham wonder if Pochettino’s departure in November 2019 scarred Levy. For a while, Levy seemed almost giddy with Pochettino, as the pair rode horses together in Argentina and went wine-tasting in the French Alps. When Pochettino sent Levy a photo of Bill Nicholson holding the front gates to White Hart Lane, Levy replied “one day it’s going to be you”. Instead, their parting perhaps reminded Levy of his old instincts, which Frank will now have to navigate. “It’s very easy, trust me, if you’re emotionally connected but not financially connected to make some very rash decisions,” Levy said, three months before hiring Postecoglou. “As much as we all love our clubs, they are also businesses where you have to make sure the income is sufficient to match the cost. It’s very easy to get into trouble. I realised quite early on that if we wanted to make Tottenham successful, it would be beneficial if someone running the club was not only a fan, but also an investor.”

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ipso regulated

 

[Gassin's finest]

Basically, he sticks his oar in too much.

 

[longtimespur]

I hope we don't fall for the new manager line where a change in manager is all we needed and all the blame gets shoved onto the previous manager. We all know who the main problem is.

SORRY'.............. I own up

 

[pablo73]

Levy is a complete control freak, I mean who would have thought it?

 

[Dunc2610]

Levy is a complete control freak, I mean who would have thought it?

Its almost like every facete of the business he comes in to contact he has to control, even micromanaging the stadium construction.

 

[PaulThurston]

TBF I could've written that.

You are Tom Allnutt and I claim my £50.

 

[McFlash]

Accessibility LinksSkip to content

Obsessive taskmaster or misunderstood visionary: who is real Daniel Levy?
The Tottenham Hotspur chairman is one of the game’s most demanding, with little interest in small talk and plenty of time spent on the training ground
Collage of three men in suits in front of Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
Tom Allnutt
, Football Reporter
Saturday June 14 2025, 5.57pm, The Sunday Times
Even for Daniel Levy, it has been a busy month: 23 days, two managers, one trophy. Another summer of change.

Those fans calling for Levy to resign in January were dancing down the High Road in May, after Spurs and Ange Postecoglou gave them the night of their lives in that Europa League final in Bilbao and the second trophy of Levy’s 24-year tenure.

Levy has rolled the dice again by sacking Postecoglou, the 59-year-old paying the price for a record 22 defeats in the Premier League, and turning to Brentford’s Thomas Frank. As the longest-serving chairman in the division, Levy’s legacy will be shaped by Frank’s success or failure. So who is the real Daniel Levy? How does he make these decisions? And after hiring his fifth permanent Tottenham head coach in six years, will he finally be proved right?

Daniel Levy and Ange Postecoglou shaking hands after the UEFA Europa League Final.
Levy greets Postecoglou after Tottenham won the Europa League last month but the head coach was sacked 16 days later
RYAN PIERSE/GETTY
Levy’s relationship with players and managers
Levy has appointed plenty of executives with the idea of stepping back on football issues but he is still involved in every area at Spurs. On transfers, Levy is there for the early recruitment meetings, when the sporting director Johan Lange and head of scouting Rob Mackenzie discuss targets for a certain position; the screening process, when targets are whittled down; and the follow-up meeting, when two or three options are presented to the head coach, who gives his order of preference.

With a first choice identified, Levy works on the negotiations, like in January, when a block in talks left Antonin Kinsky’s agent sitting in a petrol station in Prague on New Year’s Eve, prompting Levy to fly out early on New Year’s Day and strike a deal. Even at the last stage, Levy is across the final details, including a player’s medical, when he is emailed the results and knows when it finishes so he can be there at The Lodge, the club’s hotel next to the training ground, to welcome his new signing with a handshake.

Advertisement
In an interview with Varsity magazine, published in January 2020, Levy said being a chairman of a football club was like “running lots of different businesses” and he has his finger in every Spurs pie, from the academy and the women’s team, to the commercial and catering departments. He holds monthly meetings with staff in charge, where previous targets are checked and new ones issued. Levy’s environment is always demanding. “He’s a taskmaster, it’s not on his mind to make people feel good about things,” one long-time colleague said. “If you do a deal, he’s more like, ‘OK that’s great, but can we also do this?’ ”

For players and coaches, Levy keeps more of a distance and he is proud of his personal rule to stay out of the dressing room. Still, he is a visible presence around the training ground, where he spends more of his working days now than at the stadium and holds one-to-one meetings with players in his office. He discussed Postecoglou with senior players before the Europa League final while in the Amazon All or Nothing documentary, released in 2020, Levy holds crisis talks with Tanguy Ndombele, his underperforming £55million signing from Lyon. “OK, so what’s not working?” Levy says.

Mauricio Pochettino and Daniel Levy celebrating after a soccer match.
Pochettino for a while enjoyed a close relationship with Levy, especially after reaching the Champions League final in 2019
GETTY
With managers, that contact has depended more on results and relationships. Communication with Postecoglou was minimal during the final weeks of last season, even if Levy and Postecoglou saw each other most days at breakfast at the training ground and were in touch on WhatsApp. In contrast, Mauricio Pochettino received regular visits from Levy for brief chats after games while at the training ground; Pochettino once listened to Levy recommend that David Bentley, the former Spurs midfielder, talk to the club’s youngsters about staying focused on football, a suggestion Pochettino declined. “A lot of fans complain about their owners being too distant,” one Spurs employee said. “Daniel’s certainly not that. He’s an active chairman in all ways.”

Levy insists that his tenacity stems from a genuine love for the club, instilled ever since his great uncle took him to watch his first game at White Hart Lane against QPR aged “seven or eight”, when he says he wore a “huge rosette”, ate “hotdogs” and swung “one of those rattles”. But talk to those who know Levy and a word that comes up again and again is also “perfectionist”, someone for whom delegation has never come naturally. His obsession with the building of Tottenham’s new stadium gave Levy “sleepless nights”; he had cameras installed so he could watch the construction live at home and email staff with concerns. “He’s addicted to it,” another source, who worked under Levy for several years, said. The football or the business? “The job. He lives and breathes all of it.”

The Mayor of London, an NFL executive, and Tottenham Hotspur's chairman tour the construction site of the new White Hart Lane Stadium.
Levy had sleepless nights as Tottenham’s stadium was being built. Here he is with London mayor Sadiq Khan and NFL executive vice-president Mark Waller
REX SHUTTERSTOCK
Yet Levy’s all-action style inside Tottenham jars with his reluctance to engage outside the club, which creates an absence of accountability. “There’s never any defending of the club or the club defending itself, it seems to me, which makes it even more difficult,” Postecoglou said in April. Levy’s decision not to add his comment or name to the statement regarding Postecoglou’s departure was noteworthy, not least because they are curated after an initial meeting, which Levy attends, and published after a final draft, which Levy approves. It is believed the idea was to take emotion out of the announcement but to fans, Levy’s silence looked like hiding. A club spokesperson said comment from Levy wasn’t appropriate due to the collective nature of the decision made by the football management group.

Advertisement
Levy’s personality and judge of character
By his own admission, Levy has never enjoyed the limelight. He can be “reserved” and “awkward” and “doesn’t engage a room”. Yet those loyal to him insist his difficulty with small talk is often mistaken for rudeness: “If he walks past you and doesn’t say hello, he’s not being rude. He just has his mind on other things.” Levy has rarely given interviews — “I remain dignified and won’t comment,” he told the Cambridge Union in 2023 — and has addressed the players as a group on only a few occasions, like when Tottenham first qualified for the Champions League in 2010 and at the players’ party at the Carlton Hotel after Spurs won the Europa League. Wearing a white Tottenham polo shirt, Levy took the microphone and yelled “We’re champions!” before insisting the triumph would set them on the “road back to the very top”.

To make it happen, some believe Levy needs to surround himself with experienced football executives, rather than the intelligent but like-minded business brains he has relied on for so long. Donna-Maria Cullen, one of Levy’s closest advisers and a key part of the stadium project, has stepped down from the board in a move believed to have been instigated by the Joe Lewis family trust, which was aimed at shaking up the hierarchy. Vinai Venkatesham, the former Arsenal director, started work as Tottenham’s new chief executive this month. A club spokesperson said Cullen stepping back was her own decision.

Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London, visits Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
Cullen, second left, was one of Levy’s key advisors but has now stepped down from the board
SHUTTERSTOCK EDITORIAL
Lange, Levy’s latest technical director and an ally of Frank’s, is expected to stay but is from the data school of scouting, rather than those who lean on connections and instincts to find players. Lange and Frank have known each other for 20 years and worked together in their native Denmark. Scott Munn is expected to leave, two years after Levy made him chief football officer. Munn has been proactive in making changes, to the medical department in particular, but “lacks football acumen”, according to insiders, who said Munn has “barely been seen” in recent months. Munn’s changes to the medical staff, including replacing Tottenham’s head of medicine, head of sports science and head of nutrition last year, failed to bring improvements with injuries last season.

Amid the churn, Levy has also failed to spot or promote some of the best football minds. Michael Edwards, Liverpool’s visionary sporting director and now chief executive, was an analyst at Spurs under Harry Redknapp while John McDermott, now the technical director for England, was Pochettino’s trusted academy chief. Damien Comolli, one of Levy’s first directors of football, has just been appointed general manager at Juventus and Paul Barber, who first worked under Levy in 2005, has become one of the most respected chief executives at Brighton & Hove Albion. In an interview with The Times in 2023, Barber said Levy was “challenging, demanding, at times unreasonable, but very much for the good of the club.”

Levy the survivor and deal-maker
One of Levy’s favourite stories relates to a parents’ evening he remembers at school, when the head teacher told his parents he should leave because he “wasn’t going to make it”. He says his reaction was to decide he would never be beaten and he subsequently got As in his exams and went to Cambridge University, where he graduated with a first in land economy.

Advertisement
That Levy sees that tale as fundamental to his character is instructive. After university, Levy worked in investment banking and then ran several different companies, before selling the idea of investing in football clubs to Lewis, a family friend, with ENIC. When Levy took charge in 2001, Tottenham was valued at £80million while the club’s present valuation is closer to £3billion, turbocharged by a state-of-the-art training ground in Enfield, world-class stadium and regular appearances in the Champions League. In January, Deloitte’s Football Money League calculated that Spurs, with €615million (about £523million) of revenue in 2023-24, were the ninth richest club in the world.

Levy’s conviction that his job is to protect Tottenham’s interests and ensure the club is financially self-sustainable lies behind his stringent approach to spending. One Premier League club has imposed a near-complete ban on transfer dealings with Spurs, such has been the infuriation with Levy’s negotiating tactics, while Sir Alex Ferguson, after paying £30.75million to sign Dimitar Berbatov in 2008, said dealing with Levy was “more painful than my hip operation”. Levy has become convinced that Tottenham’s most expensive signings — such as Ndombele, Giovani Lo Celso, Moussa Sissoko — and managers — José Mourinho and Antonio Conte — have not been their best. Tottenham’s spend on wages as a proportion of their revenue is the lowest in the Premier League.

Yet at least one former Spurs manager felt the transfer window was Levy’s favourite part of the job, a throwback perhaps to his days in retail and investment banking, when a deal was not so much something to be negotiated but won. Sporting directors bemoan how a transfer with Levy is never closed and while there have been plenty of hits — Luka Modric (£16.5million from Dinamo Zagreb), Gareth Bale (£10million from Southampton) and Dele Alli (£5million from MK Dons) among them — Luis Suarez, Sadio Mané and Bruno Fernandes are among the many Levy swerved. Rivals have also got smart. When Luis Díaz left Porto in January 2022, Levy negotiated a lower selling price before Liverpool matched Tottenham’s offer and hijacked the deal. “He makes things difficult for people,” a source said. “And that reputation affects the whole club.”

Man holding a Jacksonville Jaguars helmet at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium has been used for Jacksonville Jaguars NFL matches
PA
Levy’s vision and priorities
As an innovator, Levy has often been overlooked. Tottenham’s 63,000-seat stadium has been a market leader for its corporate reach as a multi-purpose arena that hosts NFL games on its retractable pitch, go-karting backed by Formula 1 and music concerts from the likes of Lady Gaga and, this summer, Beyoncé. Inside the game, Levy has spoken positively about the chance of cup matches being staged abroad, while during the pandemic, he led the way among owners in the search for solutions around testing in stadiums. “There’s this idea of him as just a numbers guy, with a focus on Tottenham, but it couldn’t be further from the truth,” says an American associate of Levy’s, who has worked with Spurs in the past. “He has a real global vision of the game.” Even in the early 2000s, Levy was one of the first executives to put his faith in sporting directors.

Many Tottenham fans would say that global, corporate-first vision has seen Levy, the highest paid director in the Premier League with a salary of £3.7million, take his eye off winning consistently on the pitch. During the 2018-19 season when Tottenham reached the Champions League final, there were doubts about the commissioning of the Amazon documentary given Pochettino’s future was already uncertain, with Levy warned about agreeing to a “documentary about a divorce”. He was in awe of Pochettino’s successors, Mourinho and Conte, and in thrall to the European Super League, to which Tottenham were signed-up members. Last year, in the hunt for higher match-day revenues, Spurs announced they would be scrapping the concession awarded to new senior season-ticket holders from next season, a decision the club’s Supporters Trust described as “disgraceful”.

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Tottenham Hotspur fans protest against Daniel Levy.
Tottenham supporters have railed against Levy over the scrapping of season-ticket concessions and the club’s poor league form last season
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Some at Tottenham wonder if Pochettino’s departure in November 2019 scarred Levy. For a while, Levy seemed almost giddy with Pochettino, as the pair rode horses together in Argentina and went wine-tasting in the French Alps. When Pochettino sent Levy a photo of Bill Nicholson holding the front gates to White Hart Lane, Levy replied “one day it’s going to be you”. Instead, their parting perhaps reminded Levy of his old instincts, which Frank will now have to navigate. “It’s very easy, trust me, if you’re emotionally connected but not financially connected to make some very rash decisions,” Levy said, three months before hiring Postecoglou. “As much as we all love our clubs, they are also businesses where you have to make sure the income is sufficient to match the cost. It’s very easy to get into trouble. I realised quite early on that if we wanted to make Tottenham successful, it would be beneficial if someone running the club was not only a fan, but also an investor.”

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ipso regulated

Yep, that article pretty much sums up what we all know.
He is brilliant at some things but a pain in the arse with others and sadly, most of the others are regarding the football side of things.

He tries his best and can't be faulted for that but he's also his own worst enemy.

 

[funkycoldmedina]

Yep, that article pretty much sums up what we all know.
He is brilliant at some things but a pain in the arse with others and sadly, most of the others are regarding the football side of things.

He tries his best and can't be faulted for that but he's also his own worst enemy.

The only thing I'll add to that is that I get a feeling he wants to show his intelligence by beating the system, that his strategy can outthink the current norm.

 

[allatsea]

Levy is a complete control freak, I mean who would have thought it?

Certainly news to me lol

 

[Living Legend Colm G]

Cheers for the article but can you send these bits at the bottom onto some others for me please?

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Me, whilst im bored in hospital

 

[Spriggan]

Darren Lewis from the mirror was on talksport yesterday. He was taking about a piece on levy in the Sunday times by Tom Allnutt. Not sure if anyone can get the article but from the bits he mentioned he said levy can’t let go and has to be involved in everything

Say it ain't so, who knew!