More than Mourinho, Levy out! The one constant in the team never getting any better than almost good enough is Levy. Poch warned that Levy needed to be brave and start bringing in the future talent and culling the aging talent, 2 years ago! Levy balked, played Levy games and now look. Mourinho was never going to fix it, will have his reputation sullied even more for the attempt. When does Levy pay the price for failure?
We weren't in a position to spend money back then with delays on the stadium, questions around the financing of it and collapse in naming rights discussions. Now the money is there and they spend what is available. We sign 60m players and pay upwards to 200k a week. Levy out won't have any impact on policies at Spurs. What I assume you want is new owners, Levy is part owner in ENIC who own the club. They are an investment company and would sell if the kind of owner you want did come in for us. What you get if you force our the owners are more likely to be people who take up loans to buy us, have the club pay down that debt and then start to take from the profit the club makes rather than reinvest it in the club like our current owners. If Saudi royalty want to buy us then they will, you don't have to take any actions for that. We're better situated than the club has ever been. Just need to rebuild the squad and there are money to be spent.
Agreed, but as long as Levy is involved in the football decisions, we have reached our ceiling. We are like Chelsea before Abramovich took over. An attractive club that just needed the ruthless decison-maker at the top to win the big trophies.
Chelsea before Abramovich came in was in deep shit. Cuddly Ken had run them down a fiscal cul de sac, and without the kleptocrat, they'd've likely done a L**ds. Our situation is very, very different in very important ways. As to 'Levy out', all I will ask is that folks look at the trajectory of our results in the 15+ years before Levy and the 15+ years after. On the pitch - where it counts - we were a steaming turd of a club under the likes of Scholar and Sugar. I don't say this to suggest the "never any better than almost good enough" is wrong; only that a replacement is - i'm guessing at a number here, but you'll get my point - about 90-95% more likely to make us worse (and probably a lot so) than better. It's not as though taking that last step to winning the League was something that we have any reason to have expected - nice as it would have been. Surely Spurs fans don't feel entitled to better than we've recently had? If so, based upon what? I'm totally on board with blaming Levy for the fact that, in not giving Poch the support he needed on the footballing side, he has squandered our best chance at the brass ring than we are likely to see for a while. Fair enough. We've taken a giant step - maybe two - back. But I'm guessing he'll continue to make a fist of it, trying to get us back there. Our only real alternatives are investors who will try to take money out of the club, or some sugar-daddy Abramovich- Sheikh Mansour-type to make us his plaything. Neither strikes me as preferable, if I'm honest … though I realize that others may disagree. I just want to win something. That's my bitch. Levy's made us far better than good enough for that - we just haven't done it. And for that, I'm pointing my finger at players and managers, not the chairman. It's a different 'ceiling' than what Golara's talking about, I suspect; but we've deffo not reached it, or I'd be a lot happier. … again … with all respect and fully aware that folks will see it differently.
oh, and one more quick (and hopefully positive) thought before I try to make something of my Saturday night: "We had our one best chance to reach our potential, and Levy blew it." This - what many of us (me included) are thinking now - is precisely what many of us were saying a few years back when he'd let Harry go, let the Modders/VDV/Bale squad disintegrate, and seemingly pissed the Bale money away on 'the (clearly-less-than) magnificent seven'. And yet within a couple years, we'd surpassed what any of us thought that potential had actually been. Fingers crossed then, eh? He may not get it right, but he'll keep trying.
Those are nice sentiments, but the history shows that every time we are on an upswing, the manager ends up falling out with Levy or Levy doesn't back the manager in the transfer market. Guess who ends up holding the can? This goes all the way back to the Martin Jol days. Levy made a big fuss of signing Juande Ramos from Seville and after he had delivered a League Cup within 4 months of getting the job, he let Keane and Berbatov go to be replaced by Darren Bent and Roman Pavlyuchenko. Redknapp produced our first two top 4 finishes and when we were in the title race, Levy backed him by bringing in Louis Saha and Ryan Nelson on free transfers before axing him in the summer. AVB didn't get the players he had asked for after a then record 72 point season, and instead had to settle for the likes of Chiriches, Soldado and Chadli. And it goes on...this is a long standing trend with Levy and I can't see it changing after 18 years. Once Mourinho finds out he's not getting the players he wants, it's going to get ugly real fast.
I think that pattern is the one that annoys me with Levy. He makes some big splashy manager appointment (Ramos, AVB, Santini) and the team gets ********ed. So he falls back to something less flashy (Jol, Redknapp, Pochettino) and the teams start to get results, but he fails to back them and the cycle repeats. Throw in the odd caretaker manager like Pleat/Sherwood between one of those cycles and you’ve got Levy’s managment hiring strategy down to a T. It’s probably not quite that repetitive, but it sure seems to be a pattern. We’re probably 9 months from hiring Hughton or Parker “until the end of the season” before hiring Nuno and having him drag 2-3 players with him from Wolves.
This is essentially what I've been saying for years. He brings in managers with a highly developed plan, but buys players not to fit that plan, but because they've got good upsell potential, the two of which seldom correlate. When it doesn't work, he brings in the 'fall back' manager to whom you refer - a gaffer that takes the squad he's got and gets on with it - and we come a lot closer to that squad's 'potential'. I'm not saying anything you haven't already just said, of course. But … … but, with Poch, it appeared that he'd found the big project-type manager that could work within Levy's modus operandi. And of course, we had some damn good times. But when Poch said we need to be bold, he was essentially saying we've put ourselves in a position to step out of that model and take the next step … but Levy just couldn't. I really can't see him finding another big-project manager that's going to work any better at Spurs than Pochettino. So to surmise: I'm agreeing with what folks are saying here about our inability (or at least the unlikelihood) to go the next step under Levy. My point is simply that I don't equate that with Levy's uselessness. It's that bad that we must, unfortunately, take with the good. And if folks don't know what that good is, I fear they'd realize it in a hurry if Levy weren't around. As to Mourinho, I've always thought him a douche, and I, like most, can't see it ending in anything but tears. Hell, I wanted Chris Hughton in. But Mourinho is here, so I want him to succeed. As to our being outplayed by inferior players, that was happening under Poch, as well. Has the modern game passed him by, too? Don't get me wrong, fellas. There's a lot to be unhappy about right now, and I'm not saying folks shouldn't bitch if they want. Fill ya boots. I'm just weighing in to say that my inclination to moan right now is tempered by the knowledge - with certainty - that things could be and can be a whole lot worse.
Often times Levy frustrates me. Then, once in a while, he'll do something that makes me laugh. [@iPaperSport] | Tottenham Hotspur chairman Daniel Levy is now stalling on the permanent transfer of Giovani Lo Celso as he attempts to negotiate a lower fee.Real Betis want the £32M fee agreed in the summer, however the Spurs chief wants a deal at less than £30M.#THFC #COYS pic.twitter.com/NkRs353M81— Ricky Sacks 🎙 (@RickySacks) January 9, 2020
Classic Levy. File that under "some people never learn". If you want to know why we don't win anything, I couldn't come up with a better example. Any normal club would have had that deal done a long time ago
Excellent article pointing out where Levy has fallen down compared to Liverpool. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/footbal...tottenham-wake-differing-transfer-strategies/
So if the team were to be brave and sell one of the stars to raise money to buy incoming players, as Liverpool did with Coutinho, who would you be willing to sell? Kane? Son? Alli? Lloris? I think the problem for us (as fans) is everyone we would like to see go (Wanyama, Dier, Rose, etc.) would hardly bring in much of a fee. So you would need to sell 4 to get the money to bring in one really good player, rather than sell one to bring in several. Of the "stars," I think Iwould be most willing to let Lloris go. He seems to be slipping and Gazzaniga is pretty solid.
The time to cash in on the star players has come and gone because of Levy's hardball negotiating tactics. Eriksen, Alderweireld, Rose and Dembele could have fetched over 150 million between them had they been sold in the summer of 2018 and Jack Grealish could have been brought in at the same time had Levy not dithered over the transfer fee. This is what led to Pochettino's frustration. Jurgen Klopp's first game as Liverpool boss was against us at WHL in 2015. There are only 4 players on the Liverpool team from that day that are still with the Reds, while we still have 10 who were in the squad that day. That is all you need to know. If the player won't sign, he's gotta go.
The most damning thing is IMHO that Levy have been unable to put a reasonable pricetag on the players so they can be sold before they approaching their ‘sell before’ sate such as Eriksen
Hopefully that lesson has been learned, what with having this bullshit go on for 3 players at the same time. And the time to shit or get off the pot is two years before the contract expires, not one year.
I will say that there is a lot to like about Levy. He has financially led the club very, very well, and got the club and fantastic new stadium - man is that thing amazing to look at. But he is not an inherent football man. And he does not have that ruthlessness to get the club to the next level, to win. There is a reason why Man City and Liverpool and even both London Blue and London Red have won - the ownership has a ruthlessness to win. Why do you think Man U have struggles since SAF left? Their ownership is not ruthless. Part of that ruthlessness is to spend big. Yes, Man City is in another league with that, but Liverpool are not, yet they are still willing to spend big.
I don't think it is a question of spending big. Look at Leicester and look at us under Poch. It is about backing the manager's vision and not bottling transfers by dithering or trying to change the terms at the last minute. If the manager says I no longer want player X, get off your butt and sell player X.
About what? That Spurs are a swamp? That Levy must go? There's surely no consensus on either; though I'm pretty sure no one will argue that our current managerial situation isn't a clusterf*ck.
That Levy must go. Business wise, he has set up Spurs wonderfully. Fantastic new stadium, excellent supplemental income coming into New WHL (all while keeping the stadium in the same location). But he just can't get the right people in the right places well enough, and he won't pay enough for players necessary to stay in the top 4, let alone challenge for the title. On the football side, he is not good enough. And it now looks like Kane is very likely to leave this summer.