Hashtag Levy Out

It’s indelibly British to be a little cynical. No matter how good things may get, it’s part of our identity to be somewhat miserable and discontented. We moan about the weather, we lament over politics, and most definitely whinge about our beloved football. It doesn’t mean we care for our lives any less, quite the contrary; it’s precisely because we want the things that we are passionate about to flourish that we grumble over its constant disappointments.

Visit any football ground in the country and over almost every swilled pint, or each devoured pie, you’ll hear snippets of negative opinion, from fans that know best and certainly better than every manager, player, or owner that ever existed.

And Spurs are no different.

Spend any time on the fringes of the Spurs support, and particularly on the gluttony of the Spurs-centric social media and you’ll soon find the misery. From YouTube to Twitter, there’s a particular group of fans, a very small, but very vocal group, that absolutely despise Tottenham’s owners, the majority shareholders, ENIC Group, and the man they installed as the chairman, Daniel Levy.

The big problem is they won’t shut up. Not a day goes by without the Twitter hashtag #LevyOut popping up on my timeline somewhere and ruining my otherwise positive view of the club. It seems like they’re hell bent on ruining the discourse for the rest of us.

It’s not that we don’t get the various points that they regularly bring up, often via 280-character ranting outbursts and endless YouTube debates that rarely encounter opposing viewpoints. Indeed, we fully understand their starting point. ENIC has been truly shambolic over the years, a clumsy gargantuan mess at times. As if operating out of some distant Star Destroyer, Levy and his evil emperor, the inconspicuous owner of ENIC, Joe Lewis, have made some impressively poor decisions since they took control of our club back in 2001.

Whether it’s the sacking of the broadly popular manager, Martin Jol, who was un-surreptitiously sacked at half time(!) during a UEFA Cup match with Getafe. Or perhaps the more recent flirtation with the European Super League; a ludicrously bad break-away idea to reform European club-level competition.

ENIC has resided over numerous missteps, none more regularly than with the single most important element of any football club – its recruitment. You could cite any number of examples here, as they’ve racked up 13 managers in 21 years – a sure sign that things haven’t always gone to plan, but also with the playing staff, as we’ve had to tolerate cheaper purchase options, from the likes of  Benjamin Stambouli instead of Morgan Schneiderlin, to Louis Saha instead of Luis Suarez, painting a picture of Levy as a tight-assed scrooge. All this pales into insignificance when you consider that Levy failed to buy any players whatsoever at the peak of the Pochettino era, going several transfer windows without fresh additions – the first club in Premier League history to fire such blanks since the transfer window’s inception.

Then there’s the ticket prices, the highest of any club in the entire country. As the saying goes, “If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys”, but the same can be said for the opposite. Expectations inflate in line with the prices being paid. Part of the reason the prices are so detestably high is because demand is enormous, because our club happens to be in one of the richest, most-expensive cities in the world and because income has to rise if our club wants to avoid paying with more peanuts. However, failing to deliver success whilst milking your forever-committed audience, will only breed contempt. And this brings us to their biggest gripe of all: the lack of trophies.

Surely the sole purpose of a club’s existence, its modus operandi, is to win competitions. ENIC has managed to deliver just one cup since it took over 21 years ago. If up to 4 significant trophies are available each year, that’s 83 potential trophies that we have failed to secure. That’s 83 giant collective sighs. 83 disappointments. 83 near misses. 83 squandered chances. It gets to you after a while.

And this is the thing. It’s got to ALL of us. Really it has. We all want the same thing, to support the club we love and to celebrate victories together. We should be committed and unified in this lifelong pursuit. It shouldn’t separate us though. Chat to any stranger and if you discover they’re also a Spurs fan you’ll instantly connect. Spurs is our bonding agent, the glue that sticks us together, the shared dream, the chorus we all sing, the unbreakable handcuffs. It’s the un-divorceable marriage, the concrete relationship, we’ll grow old together, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until death do us part. This is our solemn vow.

Except this marriage has made some of us perturbed and miserable.

But in reality, supporting Spurs has twisted into something even worse than that. The anti-ENIC supporters, the whinging wives of Spurs’ fandom, are fixated on systemic change and they want our owners gone, so much so that they’ve become blind to the realities of the world in which they stand every weekend afternoon.

As turbulent and undulating as the roller coaster ride that Spurs support has undoubtedly been, we are now finally reaching the empyrean promised lands. ENIC had a grand plan and after 21 years it’s finally ripening. This marriage is about to blossom and peak, yet the anti-ENIC fans can’t see it.

So who are these fans? Mostly, they’re glass-half empty personality types, easily segregated into, (although not exclusively), two common demographic sets: bitter, middle-aged white men and entitled Millennials that have grown up playing football on consoles. They all live on Twitter and YouTube, use the hashtags #ENICout and #LevyOut and are very, very aggressive.

Clumsily-organised demonstrations, often poorly attended, outside the stadium, or the training ground, show us a group empowered by the illusion that echo chambers can often provide via social media. As Tony Blair’s press secretary, Alisdair Campbell once suggested, “For every one protester seen on the streets, you should assume that there are another 50 that stayed at home”. There’s rarely been more than 50 people in attendance at an ENIC-out protest and that’s being generous, so it is assumed that could bring their (stay-at-home) total numbers up to around 2000-3000, but when you place such numbers in the context of the 10’s of millions of Spurs fans world wide, it is clear that they’re in a tiny minority of less than 0.1% of the total Spurs fanbase. Unfortunately, the long shadow of their gloomy cloud stretches far over the rest of us.

At the start of 2022, it was reported that one protester had allegedly printed off 500 t-shirts in preparation of a protest he had whipped into existence (following a January transfer window that at first looked disappointing, but ended with us buying Kulusevski and Bentancur, who in turn helped us earn a top 4 finish), but not only was the protest wildly impatient and tone deaf, but the two dozen or so protestors that stood outside the training ground one freezing cold January afternoon weren’t even joined by the original instigator, who incidentally has now deleted his Twitter account. The t-shirts are probably still unsold on Ebay somewhere. There really is no better example of how over-reactive their takes are and how small this movement really is.

It’s worth remembering that nobody is particularly ‘ENIC-in’, as we haven’t been blind to our owners’ mistakes, but of course the protestors dismiss any fan that debates against their campaign as the enemy – as “Levy-lovers” – which is only encouraged by the polarised discourse that social media tends to develop on any given topic. In turn, most grown up, positive fans are put off joining their online debates, forever compounding their echo chamber.

Their seemingly irreparable relationship with Levy hit a new low this summer. Rather than being pleased that our owners released a record £150m into the kitty and set about buying an astonishing 7 new players, they instead totted up the net spend and complained that it was short of the proposed £150m figure by a few quid. As if net spend is an accurate method for assessing whether our team has improved or not. They seem wrapped up in the misguided narrative that the more expensive a player is, the better he must be. Of course that ignores the multitude of variables that go into the price of a player (some of the anti-ENIC group were seen comparing the £60m spent on Richarlison and bemoaned that we could have got Haaland for that price). One of the underlying reasons for this frustration is due to a particularly strong emotion; jealousy.

Since ENIC took over from Alan Sugar in 2001, the English football landscape has shifted against us. Other, (far richer), investment companies have bought up Chelsea, (who had been stumbling around mid-table in previous years), and Manchester City, (who had previously fallen off the landscape altogether). These two clubs alone have snapped up over 30 of the available trophies since 2001.

If you want more examples of how few clubs now compete for the top honours, then consider the following…11 of the 21 FA Cups between 2001-2021 were won by just 4 teams, Liverpool, Manchester United, Manchester City and Chelsea. 17 out of the 21 League Cups were won by the same 4 clubs over that period. 18 of the 21 Premier League titles have been won by that same 4 set of clubs. Now imagine taking Chelsea and City out of those stats?

The truth is, we are no longer meeting QPR or Nottingham Forest in cup finals, it’s oil-doped super clubs that are repeatedly snapping the trophies up (City won 6 out of the last 9 league cups, including 4 in a row between 2018-2021). Remove the owners from both Chelsea and City, put them back in their boxes and Spurs would have enjoyed 12 top 4 finishes out of the last 13 seasons, and we’d have won the league in 2017. Were that the case we’d all be lauding how awesome Levy has been. ENIC have suffered more than most when it comes to the dubious new owners of our competitors, to say nothing of the challenge it adds in recruitment, (we all remember Chelsea snatching peak Hazard and a young Willian from under our noses). Enter Newcastle stage left. At least it’ll be a few more years before they compound things.

It’s also worth adding that the negative issues with recruitment are somewhat short-sighted too.

For every Stromboli, for every Jansen or N’Jie, there’s been a Bale, or a Modric, a Son or a

Vertonghen. You simply cannot ignore the fact that recruitment is extremely difficult – like playing 3D chess with millions of pounds at stake. It’s always a gamble, even if you do spend 10’s or even 100’s of millions – just glance through any club’s past signings and you’ll see that there are no guarantees. You can’t blame Levy for the poor signings whilst ignoring the many incredible ones too. That 2016 team was as good as any Tottenham side in its long history. That team was indeed put together by Daniel Levy.

And this bleeds into a broader mindset, this stormy minority are fixated on ENIC’s errors. They are obsessed with our recent past mistakes. But there are a whole host of positives being ignored. This isn’t a case of ‘not seeing the wood for all the trees’, more like ‘not seeing the metal for all the Maserati’, or ‘the brick for all the palace’. It’s honestly tragic if you really think about where Spurs find themselves in 2022. To waste your time moaning about Spurs, when they’re finally found ascending once again, seems plain ignorant.

Any misery during this current golden period makes them look like John Cleese in that scene from Monty Python’s movie, film izle, The Life Of Brian, in which he’s complaining “What have the Romans ever done for us?”. Well, we now enjoy the best stadium in the country, the players have one of the best training facilities in the country, we have employed one of the best Directors of Football in the world, as well as one of the best managers in the world. We get to watch the best strike force we’ve ever seen bang in goals week after week. We are in the

Champions League and currently sit 3rd in the Premier League. “Well, apart from all that…”

As their arguments fade and their narratives become tone deaf, they’ve more recently turned on our own fans, claiming that we are somehow to blame. That we have been seduced by Levy or that we are satisfied with mediocrity. That we are happy clappers or Levy Lovers, blind to their takes on reality. In some corners they proclaim that neither us nor Levy even want Spurs to win trophies, instead we have eternally settled for achieving a top 4 finish at best. Of course none of this is remotely true and can be explained and thought through; we just have a broader, grown up, level-headed view of our club’s trajectory. We don’t blow so hot and cold through the highs and lows, or exist in an angry bubble, or look for someone to blame, or to direct our venom upon, every time things don’t go the way we’d hoped.

We know where we’ve come from (some of us had to experience the 1990s – imagine if Twitter had existed back then!) and we know that football isn’t just about winning the occasional cup it’s so much more than that. It’s about feelings, passion, family, traditions, superstitions, moments, match days, unity, tribes, socialising, singing your heart out and more. Throwing your toys out of the pram every time we exit a competition says more about your ego than your loyalty.

Even if you strip away all of the romantic, personal journey that a lifetime supporting Spurs can bring, the real key to success often comes down to one thing – the manager. And this is where we want to start concluding our article. If ENIC’s master plan was to turn Spurs into a revenue-generating, self-sustaining, giant football club, able to compete long term, at the very top table of world football, then over the last two decades that dream has been turned into reality. If that focus was at the expense of a few trophies (don’t forget we’ve also enjoyed 6 finals since they bought us too, including the Champions League, none of which we were ever favourites to win on the day), then so be it. All the pieces of the puzzle are finally in place, none more so than with the appointment of Antonio Conte.

The Italian maestro is ours. Counted among the world’s very best, still enjoying the peak years of his managerial career, he’s working wonders at our club. The Conte effect cannot be underestimated and was indeed on full display with our top 4 finish last season. Every club lives and dies by the effect that its manager has on the club. Take Klopp out of Liverpool and they’d surely deliver less. You could even take Guardiola out of the behemoth that is Manchester City and they’d bring home fewer cups. Just look at what happened to Arsenal after Wenger, or Manchester United after Ferguson. Managers matter and we have that particular element in place, largely thanks to Levy. Conte has set us in the ascendancy once again, so let us ALL enjoy it, embrace it.

I ask any anti-ENIC, Levy-hating supporters to ask themselves what it would take to finally achieve satisfaction and to end their campaign? Imagine if your wife was forever bitter and disappointed because you weren’t in fact George Clooney? Be realistic too. We can’t go from a transitional season in which we sacked a manager and scraped 4th on the final day, to winning the league, (no matter who we bought in one single summer window). Be fair, reconsider and recalibrate. Leave the past behind, see things in context and try to move on with the rest of the fanbase.

We know your frustrations are precisely because of your passion. We understand that it’s difficult to watch our competitors achieve more than us, but that will happen most seasons, no matter how well we compete. Our bridesmaid status will end one day and in that singular moment of unbridled joy, let the unificating, positive rush of feelings sustain you.

As Nick Hornby, author of the best-selling football novel, Fever Pitch, once proclaimed, “the natural state of the football fan is bitter disappointment…We ultimately invest years of our lifetime into something in which we have no control”. What you can control is how you navigate it, how you understand it, how you react to it and whether you help unify it.  For the foreseeable future at least, Levy is not going anywhere, your wife won’t be running off with George Clooney either. You can’t divorce your club, or even offer up a trial separation, this is it.

Remember, you are Tottenham, I am Tottenham, we are all Tottenham and Tottenham is us. We only really affect each other, not the ownership. It’s no good trying to separate us, we’ll be here standing side by side long after ENIC has gone, so quit the endless division and pause to think before using that damn hashtag once again.