The worn-down, grim-faced Tottenham fans. The protest banners. The chants. It is a scene we are familiar with, the anti-Daniel Levy movement, mobilised on the High Road outside the stadium he built, and we are about to see it again.
The last time was before the Premier League game against Liverpool on 22 December and there were a couple of hundred there, along with the obligatory rubber-neckers, including the photographers who filed their pictures back to the news desks. It is amazing how the tight-angle shots come across. The tourists got out their cameraphones. Of course they did.
The organisers gave away black balloons, with Levy Out written on them, and the idea was for people to release them in the 24th minute of the game. The black was for doom and gloom; the number for Levy’s 24-year chairmanship.
Did anything happen? It was hard to make out a coordinated display. Luis Díaz had put Liverpool in front on 23 minutes and maybe that drew the focus. Then again, there was the sight of what looked like a couple of dog-poo bags blowing around the pitch for the remainder of Liverpool’s 6-3 win. The realisation would dawn; they were burst balloons. Either way, there was a metaphor.
Spurs had entered the game in 11th place. Four weeks earlier, with the team 10th, Ange Postecoglou had said there would be “a lot of scrutiny” on his position as the manager if they remained there at Christmas.
The club are 14th before Manchester United’s visit on Sunday and Postecoglou has indeed been questioned. He has overseen the collection of seven points from 11 matches. Spurs exited the Carabao Cup and FA Cup last week at Liverpool and Aston Villa respectively. They are still alive in the Europa League and that is huge for Postecoglou. Just as important has been his mastery of the narrative around his injury-ravaged squad.
The biggest takeaway during games from their horror run has been the lack of supporter calls for Postecoglou to go. There was mockery at Villa Park last Sunday for how badly his team played in the opening 20 minutes. But the diehards do not blame him in the first instance.
They blame the man who asked Postecoglou to manage for so many weeks with threadbare resources, especially throughout January when the transfer window was open. They blame the man who they believe has not gone deep enough with his investment in the squad, the lone constant from the past 24 years as managers of all profiles have come and gone with only one trophy delivered – the 2008 League Cup. They blame Levy.
It is the Change for Tottenham action group that have organised Sunday’s demonstration. The plan is for fans to gather at 2.45pm where Lordship Lane meets the High Road and march peacefully to the ground. After the full-time whistle, there is to be a sit-in protest in the South Stand Lower. “This is about passion, pride and protecting our club from greed-driven failure,” the group said. “To make it clear to the board that enough is enough.”
If previous actions have been underwhelming, it will be interesting to monitor this one because feelings are running high and the club have arguably never been lower in the Levy era. The 2003-04 season was a disaster under the caretaker manager David Pleat, who stepped in after Glenn Hoddle was sacked in late September. The team were never higher than 10th, grubbing around in the lower reaches of mid-table for most of it before ending up 14th. It was early days for Levy.
There was also the notorious two points from eight matches at the start of 2008-09 under Juande Ramos, which led to the call for Harry Redknapp. At about this time of the season, Redknapp had Spurs 17th but the trends were upward and they would finish eighth.
What makes it more frustrating now, more difficult to fathom, is that Spurs are firmly established among the financial elite. According to Deloitte’s most recent Money League for 2023-24 – published on 23 January – the club were the ninth-richest in world football with an annual turnover of £512m. This was during a season when they did not compete in Europe. Spurs’s most recent accounts for the year ended 30 June 2023 – published on 3 April 2024 – had shown record revenue of £549.6m.
Commercially, 2023-24 was a blockbuster period. The top-line figure of £247.4m was up £19.65m on the previous year and was helped by the stadium’s capacity to stage concerts and other sporting events. Levy has driven this, it is down to his business acumen and there is a part of him that surely believes he has held up his end. It is not as if he has failed to spend on transfers. He has overseen an outlay of £550m in net terms on players since the rebuilt stadium opened on 3 April 2019. Levy cannot play centre-half, the area where Postecoglou has been hardest hit by injuries.
Yet there are details within it all, taking in the kind of players bought, their profiles, the bets on potential. A line that damned Levy was provided by Deloitte, the one which showed Spurs’s wages-to-revenue ratio for 2023-24 was 42% – the lowest in five years and a number that was significantly lower than the other clubs in England’s “Big Six”.
If you do not pay the top wages, you do not get the superstar players. The 42% spoke to excessive caution, a lack of ambition, feeding the “profit over glory” criticism from protesting supporters. In this context, the optics of Levy’s salary are not great. According to Spurs’s most recent annual report, he received remuneration of £3.581m, plus an accrued bonus of £3m paid across the year.
For weeks, the game has been ablaze with Spurs takeover rumours. There is a buyer, agents and financiers have claimed. It is known that Amanda Staveley, the former Newcastle director who brokered the Saudi takeover at St James’ Park four years ago, has become a figure of influence at Spurs. The Guardian reported on Wednesday that a group of private Qatari investors were looking to get on board.
Spurs’s ownership structure shifted on 5 October 2022 when Joe Lewis, the billionaire businessman and ultimate benefactor, stepped back from his publicly stated position. He ceased to be a part of the Lewis Family Trust which controls Spurs, transferring it to unnamed members of his family.
The 88-year-old Lewis has subsequently endured a well-documented fall from grace. Charged with insider trading in the US on 26 July 2023, he was sentenced to three years of probation and fined $5m (£4m) on 4 April 2024.
The Lewis Family Trust owns 70.12% of Enic, the company that holds 86.58% of the shares in Spurs. Levy and certain members of his family own the other 29.88% of Enic. Lewis has two children, Vivienne and Charles, and the family’s interest at Spurs is being looked after by two trustees. Vivienne attends Spurs games but she does not have an input into the day-to-day running of the club.
The Guardian understands that the Lewis family are open to selling but what of Levy? He is consumed with Spurs, working around the clock to make them better and push the brand, especially in North America. Could he walk away? Perhaps not, which is why his staying on to run the club under new ownership if there were a sale ought not to be discounted.
Postecoglou is focused on the Manchester United match. He has had it circled in his diary for a while, describing it at the end of January as a “point for us to relaunch our campaign”, mindful as he was that some of his injured players would be back.
How is that looking? The goalkeeper Guglielmo Vicario is poised to return to the starting XI and Destiny Udogie and James Maddison are expected to be in the squad. Brennan Johnson, Timo Werner and Wilson Odobert are back in training. Micky van de Ven, Cristian Romero, Radu Dragusin, Dominic Solanke and Richarlison remain out.
Postecoglou said that centre-half Van de Ven had been to see a biomechanical expert outside the club as they seek to get to the root of his hamstring issue and “make sure his body is better equipped to handle the kind of athlete he is”. Van de Ven – and Romero, for that matter – may have to be patient. It is not a commodity that is in plentiful supply at Spurs.
