Levy has been fair game for cheap gags ...but he’s laughing at all of us now
DURING Covid times when the Premier League’s chief executives and chairmen used to meet remotely via Zoom to talk about the many problems associated with lockdown and football behind closed doors, there was a running joke between a couple of them.
‘When stadiums were slowly opening up with reduced capacities we had to decide who to allocate tickets to first,’ one executive told me. ‘We talked about key workers and things like that. And the gag was that Daniel Levy would welcome his corporates back before anyone else.’
And that’s the thing about Levy. He’s fair game for those who like to suggest he cares only about money, that he doesn’t have a heart that beats like a football fan, that to him it’s always been about the business and not the glory.
The Tottenham chairman has been an easy target for the cheap gags and the criticism firstly because he never answers back and secondly because some of it has always been true.
For Levy has always run his football club like a business. He hasn’t thrown money around on players. He hasn’t sought popularity with his supporters by wildly signing big names and he hasn’t looked to keep his managers happy by giving them free rein every time a transfer window opened.
And now we are here. January 2024. The transfer window that saw some chickens come home to roost for Premier League football clubs.
A time when even clubs such as Manchester United cannot spend because of the Premier League’s profit and sustainability rules and because of mistakes and poor judgments made in the past. When an outfit such as Chelsea wonder to themselves just how so much money was spent on so little of worth.
Yes, January 2024. The window when all of a sudden it looks as though Levy and Tottenham may have known what they were doing all along.
Tottenham are fourth in the Premier League. They have a bright manager in Ange Postecoglou and a promising team who look set for a shootout for the fourth Champions League spot with Aston Villa. That’s if they don’t also catch rivals Arsenal in third. And off the field, Tottenham are making money like never before. Levy gambled big when he built the new Tottenham Hotspur Stadium and the club will be paying back the loan for years to come.
But that stadium is now also acting like a giant cash machine for Tottenham. Premier League football. NFL games. Big-name concerts. Sophisticated merchandising outlets and food and drink concessions.
Levy must hear the tills ringing every time he wakes up and now we learn the £549million in revenue the club pulled in for the year 2022-23 was the most of any club in London. And, according to industry experts such as the respected Kieran Maguire, Tottenham’s matchday revenue may well top United’s if they do play in the Champions League next season.
‘The results from Spurs are a vindication of the long-term strategy that’s been employed by Levy,’ Maguire told Football Insider.
‘He has grown the club’s ability to be multifunctional and own a very attractive piece of real estate in the form of the new stadium.
‘That has paid off. Spurs have gone from having £35m a year in matchday earnings to well over £100m. That will improve their ability to compete in the transfer market and in terms of player wages.’
Levy- sceptics — and there are thousands of them within the Spurs fanbase — will point to the fact that their club haven’t won a trophy since 2008. They want silverware rather than silver coins.
They won’t win one this year either. Postecoglou’s team have made unexpected progress in the league but flunked in both domestic cups. So that quest will go on. But the fact is, Levy has positioned himself and his football club perfectly in an age when rivals are being squeezed by the rules on spending. Tottenham spent well on players last summer as Postecoglou built a team in anticipation of Harry Kane’s departure and were out of the blocks at the start of this month to bring in Timo Werner on loan from RB Leipzig and centre back Radu Dragusin for £20m from Genoa.
Werner is one of many cast-offs from Chelsea’s years of boom and bust. On the King’s Road, the recent trick has been to spread the cost of transfers over long contracts. It’s an old trick employed by everyone, but Chelsea have taken it to the next level.
They have, by all accounts, 13 players — including six signed last summer — whose contracts don’t expire until the next decade. In layman’s terms, this is called kicking the can down the road.
Chelsea may well win something this season. They are in the Carabao Cup final against Liverpool.
Levy and Postecoglou have yet to cross that bridge and at some point the Spurs chairman will face that old and familiar dilemma of whether to put his hand deeper into his pocket than feels comfortable. It will be a key moment both in terms of his relationship with Postecoglou and his club’s long-term future.
But have a look at the way Chelsea, and indeed Manchester United, are set up for the future and then take a look at Tottenham. Who would you rather be?