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Daniel Levy

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I’m have mixed feelings… Levy needed to go and was hampering our on pitch performance. As he famously said when asked why we kept falling short, he does not pick the team or motivate the players. But what the interviewer failed to follow up with was “yes, but you ultimately choose who to buy and how much to pay them”. It is becoming more and more obvious just how much he is to blame for us not selling players, and for players to not want to come to us because of that. He was the king of collecting deadwood, some recent examples being Gil, Reguilon, Solomon and Ndombele.

However, despite his departure, I am sure most spurs fans have a slight feeling of trepidation. The Lewis family may sell. The majority of their business is done in America. Will we get an iteration of the Glazers who suck funds out of the club. I’d rather Levy than a US business owner. On the other side of the coin, we may get Arab state owners. That would leave a lot of people feeling morally uncomfortable. Plus i don’t think many of us want to ‘buy trophies’. The best outcome is that we stay under Lewis / ENIC ownership…. And they finally prioritise the football team on the pitch. Just increasing our wage to revenue ratio from 40% to 55% would make us so much more competitive, with 5 or 6 more £250k a week players whilst still being well run and sustainable. And importantly leaves us fans able to say we deserved it / earned it (unlike Chelsea and Man City).
 
spids said:
I’m have mixed feelings… Levy needed to go and was hampering our on pitch performance. As he famously said when asked why we kept falling short, he does not pick the team or motivate the players. But what the interviewer failed to follow up with was “yes, but you ultimately choose who to buy and how much to pay them”. It is becoming more and more obvious just how much he is to blame for us not selling players, and for players to not want to come to us because of that. He was the king of collecting deadwood, some recent examples being Gil, Reguilon, Solomon and Ndombele.

However, despite his departure, I am sure most spurs fans have a slight feeling of trepidation. The Lewis family may sell. The majority of their business is done in America. Will we get an iteration of the Glazers who suck funds out of the club. I’d rather Levy than a US business owner. On the other side of the coin, we may get Arab state owners. That would leave a lot of people feeling morally uncomfortable. Plus i don’t think many of us want to ‘buy trophies’. The best outcome is that we stay under Lewis / ENIC ownership…. And they finally prioritise the football team on the pitch. Just increasing our wage to revenue ratio from 40% to 55% would make us so much more competitive, with 5 or 6 more £250k a week players whilst still being well run and sustainable. And importantly leaves us fans able to say we deserved it / earned it (unlike Chelsea and Man City).
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The biggest and best thing Levy did was the infrastructure and funding. The stadium, its events, NFL etc generate loads of cash, the land around the stadium is still being developed. Additionally our debt is low interest long term bonds more like a mortgage than credit card. That infrastructure supports our PSR and why we are never close to breaching it.

Any buyer basically has a finished club but also one they can expand with hotels, casinos and whatever they dream up. It’s a cash rich owners paradise. The club basically lacks a cash rich owner like many clubs in the league have to fund the development of more projects and fund the team. We get that and this thing takes off in a big way. Lewis family won’t be stupid, if they get minority investors it will be to pump cash in.

Levy’s way of thinking was great to get the infrastructure to this point but he isn’t the man to make a football team successful. You need someone who is laser focused on building an elite team and that is someone else.
 
Rocket said:
Knowing your parents have passed their prime and are more of a hindrance than a help is not a nice place to be for a lot of people. Especially when they are the ones responsible for everything you are working with. Especially if they are not aware in the same way as you are

Also, no matter how ruthless you are there’s very little you can actually do if the legal power doesn’t lie with you.
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My mother passed away last year and I was the one left holding the bag for her affairs. My uncle's family did a runner with her trust fund and broke all contact when I asked them for documentation to confirm or deny my entitlement to funds. My estranged brother and sister didn't want anything to do with my mother's affairs either.

My grandfather's estate was valued by the Probate Registry at £466,507 at the time of his death and of that my sick and disabled mother received £3,000. There was a strong pattern of favouritism towards my uncle's family and my grandparents were more inclined to trust my uncle's family because they were the ones with a financial background - my cousin is an accountant and my aunt worked for NatWest.

As it turns out, the trust I've been excluded from is a discretionary trust just like the one that controls our club. Very useful for insulating the well-heeled from inheritance tax and protecting them from legal claims from inconvenient autistic relatives they want to treat like dirt. I wonder what kind of legal recourse the club would have in the event of financial abuse from the Lewises. For me, there is absolutely none - my aunt and cousin could quite literally put all of my mother's money on the stock market, lose it all and not be financially responsible for any loss under the terms set out in my grandmother's will. She pretty much gave them a blank cheque to do what they like with the money and, as the trust is discretionary, it doesn't form part of my mother's estate and I have no automatic right of entitlement.

I had to find all this out from public records due to the complete lack of communication from my uncle's family.
 
Col_McCafferty said:
Mate, you need to do yourself a favour and log off for a bit.

You've taken this news pretty bad, worse than a Spurs defeat in the NLD imo.

It's incredibly weird behaviour especially considering I thought you were trolling us all this time but no, you really do love the man!

:ange-facepalm2:
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Nah keep him here, it’s funny watching him getting verbally spanked all over the shop as his pathetic attempts to feel superior get utterly destroyed.

Also he can’t log off he’s got nothing else in his life to focus on. His love for Levy supersedes all.

:dembelelol:
 
spids said:
I’m have mixed feelings… Levy needed to go and was hampering our on pitch performance. As he famously said when asked why we kept falling short, he does not pick the team or motivate the players. But what the interviewer failed to follow up with was “yes, but you ultimately choose who to buy and how much to pay them”. It is becoming more and more obvious just how much he is to blame for us not selling players, and for players to not want to come to us because of that. He was the king of collecting deadwood, some recent examples being Gil, Reguilon, Solomon and Ndombele.

However, despite his departure, I am sure most spurs fans have a slight feeling of trepidation. The Lewis family may sell. The majority of their business is done in America. Will we get an iteration of the Glazers who suck funds out of the club. I’d rather Levy than a US business owner. On the other side of the coin, we may get Arab state owners. That would leave a lot of people feeling morally uncomfortable. Plus i don’t think many of us want to ‘buy trophies’. The best outcome is that we stay under Lewis / ENIC ownership…. And they finally prioritise the football team on the pitch. Just increasing our wage to revenue ratio from 40% to 55% would make us so much more competitive, with 5 or 6 more £250k a week players whilst still being well run and sustainable. And importantly leaves us fans able to say we deserved it / earned it (unlike Chelsea and Man City).
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Problem with increasing the wage bill is that the club is not generating enough cash to buy 5 or 6 more top earners. Doing so means equity from somewhere.
 
ChrissyWaddleShares said:
They’re in Newcastle? (And don’t have the skewed global branding that MU and Liverpool do?)
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I honestly think that the "Get rich owners in and just buy the trophies" era has passed. The league is already stupidly wealthy and it shows in the quality of the league as a whole. Every team can beat any other team on a good day. Newcastle have spent since they got new owners but all that it has given them is a couple of seasons in the CL and a league cup.

IF we get new owners those owners still have to contend with City, Liverpool, the goons, Newcastle et al.

New owners that are willing to invest more money into the football side (or ENIC employing people that are more in line with that) would do us a lot of good. But it isn't possible any more to just "buy" a trophy with players. We'd still have to earn it by going through the rest of the stacked teams to get there.
 
spids said:
I’m have mixed feelings… Levy needed to go and was hampering our on pitch performance. As he famously said when asked why we kept falling short, he does not pick the team or motivate the players. But what the interviewer failed to follow up with was “yes, but you ultimately choose who to buy and how much to pay them”. It is becoming more and more obvious just how much he is to blame for us not selling players, and for players to not want to come to us because of that. He was the king of collecting deadwood, some recent examples being Gil, Reguilon, Solomon and Ndombele.

However, despite his departure, I am sure most spurs fans have a slight feeling of trepidation. The Lewis family may sell. The majority of their business is done in America. Will we get an iteration of the Glazers who suck funds out of the club. I’d rather Levy than a US business owner. On the other side of the coin, we may get Arab state owners. That would leave a lot of people feeling morally uncomfortable. Plus i don’t think many of us want to ‘buy trophies’. The best outcome is that we stay under Lewis / ENIC ownership…. And they finally prioritise the football team on the pitch. Just increasing our wage to revenue ratio from 40% to 55% would make us so much more competitive, with 5 or 6 more £250k a week players whilst still being well run and sustainable. And importantly leaves us fans able to say we deserved it / earned it (unlike Chelsea and Man City).
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Football at this level has become pretty morally vacuous anyway. With the whole raison d’etre for the clubs and media being to make profit, and the pros that turn up being more and more mercenary (see Isak for the latest iteration of this) it’s becoming a little soulless.

Personally, as Levy and Lewis had / have been in place for so long I can almost turn a blind eye to Lewis’ ‘old-school’ ‘villainy’ - state links or American owners are just horrific to contemplate but most likely.

However, we have to take the statement released at face value and assume it’s a succession plan, rather then a sell off.

I’m worried about the future - aside from Liverpool, which of the other ‘new’ owners would I take? None.

Maybe it’s my age, but I remember clubs being owned by people who wanted success for the sake of the club, not the shareholders. Levy - rightly or wrongly - wanted to build the club but forgot to have the success on the field at the heart of things. If we are sold, or if a new leadership team comes in, will they be actually in favour of the club’s success or just something more in their portfolio, to be ejected the second it’s less profitable?

TL/DR : Bit sick of modern football. Bring back jumpers for goalposts.
 
Tottenham Massive said:
Because it's Newcastle
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If you go back to the pre ENIC years , have a look at the Deloitte Money League you will find that in the first 10 seasons of the league, Newcastle finished above Spurs 9 out of 10 times , they were a wealthier club with a larger revenue than Spurs. Now after years of mis-management at Newcastle and years of excellent management by ENIC ( a view backed by professionals in the game, Andros Townsend, David Pleat , Harry Redknapp etc.) the tables have been turned with Spurs in a far better position than they were pre ENIC.

Deloitte Football Money League - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
PointToPatrik said:
I honestly think that the "Get rich owners in and just buy the trophies" era has passed. The league is already stupidly wealthy and it shows in the quality of the league as a whole. Every team can beat any other team on a good day. Newcastle have spent since they got new owners but all that it has given them is a couple of seasons in the CL and a league cup.

IF we get new owners those owners still have to contend with City, Liverpool, the goons, Newcastle et al.

New owners that are willing to invest more money into the football side (or ENIC employing people that are more in line with that) would do us a lot of good. But it isn't possible any more to just "buy" a trophy with players. We'd still have to earn it by going through the rest of the stacked teams to get there.
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Yep - looking at tiny incremental gains now. Aside from last season we’ve been there or at the head of the chasing pack for a long time. Had we maintained the momentum from Poch we’d be in a much stronger position but who could have foreseen the sudden improvement in Villa, Newcastle etc.?
 
Deuterz said:
Meh, it didn’t give you CL football then and we were in league title conversations. It was universally considered the ugly brother of the CL and nobody wanted to be in it. The ‘you play Thursday night footy’ was roundly considered one of the sickest burns to a rival fan.

Look, I get it .. we won it, and therefore it’s now Huge. But the fans arsed about being in it when we were managed by Poch were a minority. Some were annoyed when we blatantly sacked it off but for the most part it was accepted we were trying to target bigger things.
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The one benefit of us being so shit in the league was we could go all out in the cups & prioritise it over the league. & if we were 10 points clear in the league come march, it would be understandable if we didn’t really try in any of those cups as we are going all out for the title.
You are right about things becoming bigger when it’s your team. I remember when we kept drawing lots & many on here were telling me that it’s better to be unbeaten & have less points than lose but have more points overall.:frankthink:
 
DadHeungMin said:
TalkShite talking shite with the “are Tottenham bigger than West Ham? Or could West Ham be bigger than them?” question but the interesting tidbit is how Brazil heard rumours of a verbally agreed Qatari bid.

I’d expect Brazil to be in some fairly well informed football WhatsApp group chats, so for that to be going around in football circles is interesting. Also how Redknapp feels it’ll be sold soon with some big offers already in behind the scenes, likely Saudi.
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Didn’t some Southampton guy on Talksport say they were better than us, with higher league finishes and they were beating us before Levy turned up?

This rewrite of history was not challenged.
 
ChrissyWaddleShares said:
Football at this level has become pretty morally vacuous anyway. With the whole raison d’etre for the clubs and media being to make profit, and the pros that turn up being more and more mercenary (see Isak for the latest iteration of this) it’s becoming a little soulless.

Personally, as Levy and Lewis had / have been in place for so long I can almost turn a blind eye to Lewis’ ‘old-school’ ‘villainy’ - state links or American owners are just horrific to contemplate but most likely.

However, we have to take the statement released at face value and assume it’s a succession plan, rather then a sell off.

I’m worried about the future - aside from Liverpool, which of the other ‘new’ owners would I take? None.

Maybe it’s my age, but I remember clubs being owned by people who wanted success for the sake of the club, not the shareholders. Levy - rightly or wrongly - wanted to build the club but forgot to have the success on the field at the heart of things. If we are sold, or if a new leadership team comes in, will they be actually in favour of the club’s success or just something more in their portfolio, to be ejected the second it’s less profitable?

TL/DR : Bit sick of modern football. Bring back jumpers for goalposts.
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Good post.

:contehandshead:
 
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