Levy, your £3m bonus is obscene while you price out loyal fans
The timing, as always seems to be the case with Daniel Levy’s Tottenham, could not be worse.
Just as we are told one of the most expensive season tickets in football is going up six per cent next year comes news that the best-paid administrator in english football has just seen his enormous salary increase from £3.3million to £3.6m.
And, get this, Levy also received a £3m bonus last year, which is pretty much the same amount Spurs will bring in next season by fleecing long- suffering supporters, many of whom just cannot afford to go any more. Truly, you could not make it up. Truly, it is contemptible.
It was also revealed in Spurs’ financial results released yesterday that the club made a loss of £86.8m last year. Levy got a bonus for that?
Or was it for giving Antonio Conte a reported £15m a year to produce some of the worst football we’ve seen for several seasons, completely denigrate the club and then put a metaphorical bomb under the whole operation before scarpering back to Italy with his loot? It was all going so well this season, too. Levy, either by luck or judgment, finally alighted on the right man to lead our club in the outstanding Ange Postecoglou. What he has achieved this year, irrespective of our final league position, is close to a miracle.
The supporters are totally behind the manager and his style of football again. The whole club are seemingly pulling in the same direction, from the academy to a women’s team who have reached the FA Cup semi-finals playing the same attacking football.
So, what does Levy do? he does his utmost to muck it all up, not just with the price hikes but with the even more contentious decision to phase out concessions for senior supporters, who have paid good money following Spurs all their lives.
That is what is really contemptible.
It is basically an attempt to force out ‘ legacy’ fans and replace them with the ever-growing breed of tourist supporters who will come for one game and spend far more in the club megastore than we ever will.
Let’s get one thing straight. I have no problem with seeing this new generation of supporters making the trip of a lifetime to our wonderful stadium (which, to be fair, is thanks to Levy). The growing number of Korean fans in particular, clearly there to watch Son heung-min more than the team, are a delight.
Our manager was a tourist fan and I, as a huge ice hockey
enthusiast, was one myself in October when I travelled to Pittsburgh with my son to watch the Penguins in NhL action.
But, as Oliver holt so brilliantly put it in these pages this week, those fans cannot come at the expense of people for whom our club is in their blood. Otherwise there will be no passion, no soul and no atmosphere in our grounds. Above all, there will be no community — which is where our football differs from that American experience.
I can’t imagine, for instance, we will be seeing quite so many of those Korean fans once Son moves on. Nor the two Americans,
decked out in full Spurs kit, sitting behind us at the Luton match last weekend who tapped my son on the shoulder after Son’s late winner, pointed to the big screen and said, ‘What does “COYS” mean?’
Yes, Daniel Levy has done so much good for our club and the problems others are having with the Premier League’s profit and sustainability rules should be his crowning glory. his insistence on operating sustainably is being gloriously vindicated.
But he always finds a way to throw a stone in the calm water. And he is being ever more handsomely rewarded for doing so.