Tottenham Hotspur are trapped in a familiar cycle. The club finally ended its longest trophy drought in modern history, beating Manchester United to the Europa League. If that was atypical, what’s followed has been a miserable foray through memory lane.
When the whistle blew in Bilbao in May, a collective euphoria gripped the Tottenham fanbase. It was almost surreal to see a game of actual importance end with a Tottenham victory. And it wasn’t just the ending of the 17 year trophy drought that was consequential; the victory was Tottenham’s first European trophy in 41 years, and, perhaps even more importantly, heralded a return, against all odds, to the Champions League. Spurs, in truth, had got lucky. A wretched league campaign, one that incurred a record number of losses, and resulted in the club finishing one place above the relegation zone — their worst Premier League finishing position in history — had somehow ended with entry into Europe’s most lucrative competition.
It was a bail-out, a reprieve, from what the club truly deserved last season. And yet clearly, a massive opportunity beckoned. Whatever Ange Postecoglou’s deficiencies as a coach, it was abundantly clear that the squad assembled by Levy and co. was woefully unfit for purpose. 17th was a far more accurate barometer of its ability — factoring in depth, quality, balance, and all the metrics that define proper squads — than many had wanted to admit. Because of this, there were some who believed that if anyone deserved a chance to be backed with proper tools, and lead the club into the new season it was Ange.
But of course, it’s far easier to sack the manager, and start the whole cycle again, than actually back him. No one should be surprised by now; we’ve seen this with Hoddle, Jol, Redknapp, AVB, Pochettino, Mourinho, Nuno, Conte, and every manager this board has ever hired. It’s the ENIC way, and it’s worked for 25 years, so why change now? After weeks of wasted time, and prolonged speculation, Ange was sacked, and Thomas Frank of Brentford appointed.
Despite the club’s recent track record, and all available evidence, the fuel that drives any supporter of any club, is hope. Tottenham is no different, and fans couldn’t help but wonder whether this time around — for once — the firing of Ange represented a sign of renewed ambition and competency, rather than a return to the default state of frugality and cowardice.
And so fans looked to the summer, once more, with optimism. If nothing else, there was a clear, unequivocal indictment on the squad quality. When you finish 5th, there can be some debate about how the squad underperformed, and maybe only needed some minor tweaks. When it finishes 17th, there can be no such debate. Complete, comprehensive overhaul was needed — an overhaul even in the very approach to the squad building that had enabled the 8th richest club in the world to stutter so catastrophically — and nothing less would do. For the first time in years, Spurs would also have both the money and cache of playing in Europe’s elite competition with which to lure players.
Indeed, for a halcyon 24 hours in July, Tottenham fans dared to dream. Mohammed Kudus was all but confirmed, and within hours, another “Here we go” for Morgan Gibbs-White arrived. There were rumors of Adam Wharton being lined up next, and multiple accounts of new investment and sponsorship money being pumped into the coffers. Of course, as has happened all too often under this regime, things quickly unraveled into farce. Spurs somehow contrived to become not only the first club to trigger a release clause and not sign the player, but also to receive a “Here-we-go” and end up empty handed. Evangelos Marianakis, Forest’s combative chairman, issued a strong rebuke to Levy, threatening legal action and insisting on keeping his star player. In the end, after more weeks wasted, and hopes dashed, Gibbs-White signed a lucrative new contract and ended all speculation. It has since emerged that the clause was far more intricate than it seemed, and that Levy had simply been testing the waters for a player he thought was massively undervalued. There was no real, concerted attempt to sign the player.
In essence, it was a smokescreen, as with Mane, Martinez, Eto, Diaz, and so many others over the years. Top players dangled in front of our faces, just before they’re ripped away and magically replaced with some unknown kid from the French League or Championship. We’ve seen it time and time again, and this summer was merely a microcosm of the previous quarter century.
https://www.tottenhamhotspur.com/news-archive-1/so-close-to-rivaldo/

It would take too long to list all of the top players Spurs have been linked with but failed to sign during Levy’s tenure, but yes, Tottenham really were “close” to signing Rivaldo in 2002. Moutinho under AVB, Fernandes and Dybala under Pochettino, Bastoni under Conte, to name but a few — and yet, despite all of this precedent, there’s no escaping the fact that the Eberechi Eze debacle hits especially hard.
As the summer wound down, two important things happened. Firstly, all of Tottenham’s rivals made significant, expensive improvements to their sides. Liverpool, despite winning the title, and finishing almost 40pts above Spurs, spent upwards of £300m on the likes of Florian Wirtz and Hugo Ekitike, the latter of which was — surprise, surprise — heavily linked with Tottenham. Chelsea did their usual trick of snapping up 99% of Europe’s top young prospects, all at great cost — including two strikers — Delap, and Pedro, who should have been high on Tottenham’s list. City signed Reijnders and Cherki (another long mooted Spurs target), and even United, the club Tottenham beat in Bilbao, spent £200m on an entirely new front three. It’s not inconsequential that two of their new signings were also heavily linked with Tottenham in the weeks and months prior, and that Mbuemo was even signed by Tottenham’s new manager, Thomas Frank at Brentford. But clearly Cunha and Mbeumo’s wages were a familiar sticking point, and as with Sadio Mane, Georginho Wijnaldum, and so many others in the ENIC tenure, fans found out that paying market rate for wages — even with a shiny new stadium and multiple new revenue streams, just isn’t something the club is interested in doing. Unless, of course, we’re talking about executive salaries, in which case money is no object, and no expenses will be spared…
But perhaps more importantly, James Maddison, Tottenham’s only true number 10, and the heartbeat of their creativity, tore his ACL in a friendly game during pre-season. Suddenly, Levy’s plan of sitting still and doing nothing was upended; Spurs were forced to at least pretend to enter back into the market they likely thought they’d escaped. And so, the summer’s next great transfer debacle begun, as Levy prepared to deploy his second smokescreen of the window.
The ordeal and subsequent failure to sign Eberechi Eze is particularly galling for Tottenham fans for several reasons. Firstly, there’s the fact that the club had tracked Eze literally since 2020. David Pleat had strongly recommended him while at QPR, and a deal was reportedly close to being completed. Moreover, in the years that passed, barely a window went by without him being linked to the club in some way or other. Then there’s the simple issue of the pedigree and caliber of the player. Rarely has a player been linked who was so unanimously wanted, so widely revered by almost all sections of the fanbase. A player with flair, panache, drive, hustle, technicality, pace, and most of all, end product — all things that were in acutely short supply since the departures of Harry Kane and Son Heung-Min. In short, he was a player the club, for many reasons, desperately needed.
But the most troubling aspect of the Eze saga is undoubtedly the way the deal eventually unravelled and ultimately collapsed, with Eze going not just to a rival Premier League team, but Tottenham’s bitterest rival of them all. Daniel Levy had somehow engineered and overseen one of the most brutal and embarrassing North London derby defeats in recent history. Without a ball even having to be kicked.
A combination of Nwaneri’s new deal, Madueke’s signing, and Trossard’s new contract (a pay raise that notably earns their 3rd string left winger more than our captain and highest earner), meant that they had all but abandoned their pursuit of Eze. By early August, Tottenham essentially had a free run at the player, and all signs pointed to Eze becoming a Tottenham player.
The deal was painfully close, so close that Palace fans had given their blessing to him joining, and Tottenham fans had sent their commiserations to them. But as hours turned to days, and days turned to weeks, a familiar story began to play out. Eze’s release clause was well known to everyone in football, yet Daniel Levy chose to let it pass last Friday without triggering it. In truth, that was perhaps the moment we should have seen that a deal was not happening. £68m for a player of Eze’s quality is peanuts in today’s market, and by haggling for pennies with another difficult negotiator, Steve Parish, and repeatedly frustrating them with lowball bids, Levy ensured that he fell foul of yet another Premier League club, and angered yet another chairman. It also, inevitably, left the door open for another rival to swoop in. The specter of Arsenal was always looming large, with Eze a boyhood fan of the club, and Tottenham fans across the globe were always wary of that nightmare scenario unfolding. No one would have known how bad the optics of an Arsenal hijacking would be more than Levy. He simply didn’t care. He dragged the deal on and on, almost willing, hoping for them to come in, and the unthinkable to happen. In the end, within hours of Kai Havertz’ injury being made public, the nightmare soon became a reality. Tottenham had laid the groundwork for Arsenal to swoop in right at the death. If one didn’t know better, you’d almost think Levy was an Arsenal fan himself, such is the disdain with which he treats the club he owns, and the frequency with which he allows our rivals to usurp and embarrass us.
When the news broke that Arsenal had entered the race, and within hours accomplished what Levy couldn’t do in weeks, agreeing a fee with Steve Parish and Crystal Palace, no one should have been surprised. This is Levy’s M.O, what he does best. Leaves the club a laughing stock, a perpetual source of banter fodder for its rivals, and indeed the global football community. And so, despite Tottenham’s need being magnitudes higher, our net spend being infinitely lower, and having a months long head start….another key target was added to the patented Daniel Levy smoke and mirrors list.
Going back to earlier in the summer, it’s instructive to ask just what the club was doing in those weeks while the Morgan Gibbs-White deal dragged on? More pertinently, what did they do after it fell apart? If £60m+ was truly earmarked for Gibbs-White, why wasn’t that promptly put towards another player as soon as that deal fell through? It took weeks, and a season ending James Maddison injury to re-enter the market for Eberechi Eze, inaction that left Frank with minimal reinforcements for the European Super Cup — a game Tottenham unquestionably could have won with a deeper squad. Neglect which ensured that, once again, a new manager started the new season with an unbalanced and underpowered group of players — ill equipped to fight on one front, let alone four.
To be burned this way, when so close, not once — but twice — in the same window, in same month, is special, even for Daniel Levy and his insatiable investment firm. This is a new level of neglect, greed, and incompetence, one which illustrates very clearly the impunity with which he operates. For a man who supposedly was “stepping away” from footballing operations, his shadow sure looms heavily upon everything that happens at Tottenham. The reality, is that it’s hard to imagine a CEO with this much experience in the field to be so chronically, habitually inept. It is clearly by design that the club tries and fails so frequently — like clockwork, in fact — to secure these big deals for quality players. At this point, fans, pundits, journalists, media, and the footballing community as a whole, have to realize that it’s a feature, not a bug of the ENIC regime. It’s interesting to note that the firm has no such issues closing deals in the real estate world — a crystal clear indication of where their priorities lie.
Perhaps the bigger question is what happens now? With Eze now gone, will they panic buy players ill-suited to the rigors of the Champions League, based purely on perceived financial savings? Will that money simply disappear into the ether, much like the summer in 2021 where the club agreed a fee for Lautaro Martinez, then ended with signing no one, and coincidentally never returning for him ever again? Or even last January, where a £70m bid for Marc Guehi was rejected. Where does all the money go? Gibbs-White, Eze — are these simply phantom bids to feign ambition, before diverting the funds into ENIC’s real estate and property empire? Is it chronic ineptitude that leads the club to continuously try and fail for top players, while quietly signing kids and dross on lower wages that no one else wants? Either way, it’s a familiar story, one that is growing increasingly old and tiresome.
This club has honed the ability to take success and find a way to recycle it into pain
Levy, Lange and co. need to act fast if they want to salvage some semblance of respect and competency from what has been one of the most disastrous, and comically inept transfer windows in the modern history of the club. All of that promise of the European League win, and Champions League qualification, is being frittered away into nothing — just as it was when Pochettino got us to a CL final, or Conte got us back into the Top 4. This club has honed the ability to take success and find a way to recycle it into pain. That Manchester United, the club we beat in the final of the Europa League, have spent infinitely more and improved to a much greater extent — even without any European football next season whatsoever — proves that under Daniel Levy, even winning trophies holds no great consequence for the future of the club. Its trajectory will always be curtailed and hamstrung by the financial ambitions of those in control of its prodigious purse strings.
Tottenham have entered yet another season with a squad more suited to the Conference League than the Champions League — except this year they’re actually competing in the latter. Daniel Levy, as is his custom, is arming yet another manager with a paper knife to bring to a gunfight, forcing yet another coach to make do with the barest of bare minimums. Thomas Frank, like the seventeen coaches before him, is being set up to fail. The truth is that it doesn’t matter who the manager is, whichever lame duck is unfortunate enough to sit in the dugout will invariably begin the season woefully unprepared, tasked with performing minor miracles every week and somehow closing the gap on teams that are light years ahead. Whether Frank can turn water into wine remains to be seen, but Levy has already let him — and the fanbase — down. Regardless of what he does from here on in, it will invariably be too little, too late.
Perhaps one day people will realize that Tottenham aren’t Spursy because a threadbare squad gives up 2 goal leads in the 85th minute; they’re Spursy because their board bottles every deal for a half decent player that ever comes their way. Because they refuse to pay the market rate for top players that will take them to the next level. The die is cast before a ball is even kicked. One shouldn’t expect the team to compete on the pitch, when off it, the powers that be are running for cover and cowering at every opportunity. Tottenham’s board is a rudderless, leaderless, gutless group of sycophants, whose only goal is to enrich Joe Lewis, Daniel Levy, and themselves.
As Levy himself once admitted:
There is no passion here in football. This is purely financial.
Daniel Levy.
The last 25 years have proved this rather emphatically. The sooner they’re gone, the better.
Thank you for writing this. I 100% agree with everything and I mean everything you have said. This is the Board playing with being a Premier League Club and running it in a way to line their own pockets. The inability to close big incoming deals of good players that would move us on to actually compete is structural. It is not by chance we have the best list of great players to almost wear the shirt. The number of our squad earning more than £100k pw says it all.
When we had arguably the best striker in the world at his peak Levy failed to invest enough in squad depth for Kane and Son et al to win a trophy! Surely when you have struck gold by developing a Kane you do what you can to invest in the squad. But No! Levy was happy to have on the bench Winks, Lamela (a panic buy cos Willian slipped away) and as soon as there was an injury to the first XI that was the season done!
Things will not change until ENIC have gone. They were the right owners to restructure the infrastructure of the club but they have the wrong risk profile for a successful club in the PL. Spurs is a football club first and foremost and it’s being run by excellent property developers. We need excellent sports investors to grow the franchise now….
So pls Mr Levy, thank you for the training ground, the stadium and the growing revenue…. Now is the time to exit stage left or right if you prefer and sell this club to a professional set of investors who want to grow a hugely successful sports franchise.
And yet people still give their hard earned money to the little bald rat. I cancelled my membership with good points on it in 2019 and haven’t set foot inside that stadium since, and I won’t until Levy and ENIC have gone. As long as people are spending the cash and lining his pockets he doesn’t give a damm about that club, vote with your wallets and walk away.