Article in today's Telegraph
The real Daniel Levy: What it is like to work for the Tottenham chairman
Spurs chief faces further protests this weekend but his life has been defined by fighting, proving people wrong and not losing face
Daniel Levy, a former Spurs season-ticket holder, is a genuine supporter of the club but has never cut through to the fans
Daniel Levy has a favourite story about himself. It is from a parents’ evening when he was 16 and the headteacher told his mother and father that he should leave school as he was not academic enough. “The next day I said to myself ‘I’m not going to be beaten’,” Levy says. “From that moment onward I got As in my exams and I went to university. I’m a fighter.”
It is a tale that Levy recalls to Tanguy Ndombele in the Amazon Prime All or Nothing: Tottenham Hotspur series, as the pair talk about the (disastrous) record signing’s struggles at the club. And, tellingly, it is a tale Levy also recounted when he spoke at the Cambridge Union, returning to the university where he gained a first-class degree in Economics and Land Economy.
“I had to fight to get to where I am today and everyone said I wouldn’t make it,” Levy told the students.
It is even a description that those who know Levy use today. “A lot of people don’t know the real Daniel Levy,” someone who has worked with him for many years told Telegraph Sport.
“He looks very tough, very tight, very difficult to deal with and, yes, he’s not easy to deal with. But he’s a good guy. He’s a fighter. Very, very clever and he built this by himself. Joe Lewis invested at the start but since then he has not put money into the club. Daniel has done it all.”
“This” is the modern-day Tottenham Hotspur that Levy has presided over with their state-of-the-art training ground, the wonderful, futuristic stadium and a club that are now valued at £2.6 billion by Forbes. They were worth £80 million when he took over. But, also, do not forget the underperforming football team, sky-high season-ticket prices and unhappy fanbase.
Thinking ‘too big’
In fact there are those who believe Levy has thought “too big” with his off-field ambitions to the detriment of what it is ultimately all about: the football. He maintains those ambitions are to help fund the club although he is also the highest-paid executive in the Premier League (£6.58 million a year in the last accounts) and is ranked 303rd on The Sunday Times Rich List with a net worth of £450 million. The latest plan is to build a 30-storey hotel with 180 rooms and 49 apartments adjacent to the stadium, which is due to open before Euro 2028.
Lewis is, of course, the English billionaire tax exile. He was the ultimate owner of ENIC and, therefore, Tottenham, who were acquired by the investment company in 2001 but since 2022 it has been in the hands of the Lewis Family Trust, which retains his name although he is no longer part of it. Lewis, or the trust, was never prepared to inject cash into the club after that initial outlay. Levy’s goal, therefore, was always for it to be self-sustaining.
Given his longevity – he celebrates the 24th anniversary of his appointment next month, making him by far the Premier League’s longest-serving chairman – and the infrastructure he has built without risking Spurs’ financial security, Levy should be hugely popular and celebrated.
Instead he will face more furious protests about his chairmanship after Sunday’s home game against Manchester United with fans urged to take part in a sit-in. Last weekend, during the FA Cup defeat away to Aston Villa, the frustrated Spurs supporters maligned the chairman’s name throughout, both in a chant celebrating Dejan Kulusevski and the simple “We want Levy out”. Ahead of the game against Leicester City last month a banner was unfurled which read: “24 years, 16 managers, one trophy. Time for change”.
The involvement with Lewis stems from Levy’s business background, running ENIC. Levy, who has been managing director since 1995, even refers to him as “Mr Lewis”. Despite the apparent portrayal of himself as fighting against the odds, Levy’s is hardly a story of hardship and battling his way up. He went to state school but there was already a successful family business, begun by his grandfather, Abraham, who opened a hat shop in Stratford, east London, which Levy’s father Barry diversified into men’s clothes including the Mr Byrite brand, later the retail chain Blue Inc.
Still the outsider
Even so, Levy’s words about himself reveal an attitude that has influenced him throughout his career. For good and bad. It explains, in particular, why he never wants to lose face when it comes to transfer deals and why he has acted as something of an outsider despite how long he has been a fixture in the Premier League.
“There are chips on his shoulder that come from somewhere,” says a former business associate who admires Levy’s drive and acumen but is less enamoured with his man-management and personality, describing how he runs Spurs “like an investment bank” with targets and KPIs – Key Performance Indicators – to be met. Former staff complain that even if they reached these targets they were left feeling it was not enough. Man-management, they say, is certainly not a strength of Levy’s.
Interestingly, “not good enough” is another theme that resonates with him personally. Five years ago Levy granted a rare interview to the Cambridge student newspaper Varsity in which he admitted he feared that he had failed his university finals, despite “working every hour in the last few months” because – tellingly – he thought “I just wasn’t good enough”. When he went to check which degree classification he had, he started reading the list from the bottom, where students failed or were awarded thirds.
Boasting about a thick skin
Being a fighter. Proving people wrong. Not losing face. Winning the deal. Coming out on top. Earning respect – and money – while claiming he does not care what people think of him. Boasting, apparently, about having a thick skin. All this matters to Levy and helps to explain his way of operating and his motivation.
And so Telegraph Sport has spoken to a number of people who know the 63-year-old – from former employees, business associates, club executives and agents – all on the basis of anonymity to try to build a picture of what he is like.
And there is that word, above all, that is used to describe Levy. By those who like him and also by those who are not so warm towards him. “He is a fighter,” says another long-time associate who has known Levy for many years and who cites the transfer of Harry Kane to Bayern Munich as not just his best deal but one that sums up the way he operates and why he always tries to do what he believes is in Spurs’ interests. However unpopular it makes him.
Harry Kane’s transfer to Bayern Munich epitomised Levy’s modus operandi Credit: Getty Images/Christian Kaspar-Bartke
“A lot of the decisions he makes are not popular but he is genuinely trying to do the best for the football club,” one source maintains.
The perspective from Kane’s camp on what happened is very different. It is very similar, in fact, to that of Luka Modric who, like Kane, believed he had a “gentleman’s agreement” with Levy that he could leave. The mistake both made was not to have anything in writing. And, so, when Modric tried to quit for Chelsea for £22 million – in 2011 – and gave an interview to Telegraph Sport asking to go, Levy put out a forthright statement on the club website just a few hours later killing his chances. The Croatian was eventually sold to Real Madrid the following year for £33 million but has not forgotten what happened.
And when it came to signing his replacement, João Moutinho, that deal fell apart because of Levy’s 11th-hour haggling over £500,000 on a £26 million transfer which infuriated the then manager André Villas-Boas.
Similarly, Kane believed that, in a meeting, Levy had accepted he could leave if Spurs finished outside the top four or failed to win a trophy. He wanted to join Manchester City in 2021. Levy refused, selling him to Bayern Munich two years later for £100 million – which was also the base of City’s offer. For Spurs and Levy it was a great piece of business as Kane, at 30, had just 12 months left on his contract.
‘Near impossible to deal with’
This is where opinions on Levy diverge dramatically. “He’s very hard, to near-impossible to deal with. I’d never try to buy or sell a player to Tottenham,” says one club chairman who also adds that, as a person, he likes Levy, describing him as shy but polite and, one on one, “quite good company” with a sharp sense of humour even if you have to lead any conversation with him.
Levy has even been known to perform karaoke, once persuaded to do so during a trip to Moscow for a Europa League tie by Spurs’ former executive director Darren Eales. Levy sang Sir Elton John’s Crocodile Rock.
Levy is not anti-social but he can be hard work in a social environment. He appears at his most comfortable firing off emails or WhatsApp messages and he is relentless in doing so, often with bold demands attached. Such as when he wanted to sign Wilfried Zaha in 2016 and tried to low-ball Crystal Palace by getting them to take Ryan Mason… whom he valued at £2 million more. But Levy is not a great public-facing communicator which, sources say, is partly why fans fail to connect with him.
Not only has Levy failed to connect with Spurs supporters, some of them are in open revolt about the way he has run the club Credit: Getty Images/ Michael Regan
When Levy walks into a room he can appear relatively anonymous and unassuming, which is fine. But is it what you want from a leader? Another criticism is that he has not always surrounded himself with people who make up for his weaknesses. Instead they tend to compound them.
A former highly placed employee is more withering about this: “If he had been a better football administrator – or employed one and let him get on with the job – then Spurs would be top four. Sometimes it feels like a property company with a football club attached rather than a football club with property.”
This is hotly disputed by others who know him, and the accusation offends Levy, who was a Spurs season ticket-holder and is a genuine fan of the club. He gave a presentation to all of Spurs’ 750 staff in which he put up a picture with lots of trophies on it and has admitted to feeling “sick” that Woolwich have had more success.
Levy, with just the 2008 League Cup, has vowed he will never leave Spurs without winning something else and Telegraph Sport has been told he has turned down at least three serious takeover approaches in recent years from substantial figures who decided to buy another Premier League club instead.
He has claimed to have refused bids from the Far East, Middle East and United States but continues to seek minority investment, recently holding talks with financier Amanda Staveley, who brokered the Saudi Arabian-led purchase of Newcastle United. The Qataris retain an interest in Spurs.
Levy’s supporters insist he has one overall aim: to bring success on the pitch. “He cares only about the football and that is the truth and when it comes to football he is better than everybody,” one declares, although he agrees with the view of the chairman we spoke to: some clubs do not want to deal with Levy.
“It’s very simple. Always he tries to get more and pay less. It is that simple. Sometimes it’s a crazy number and people look at him like they don’t understand where it came from,” he says.
“Some clubs are totally afraid to deal with him because they know he comes again and again and again trying to get what he wants.”
There are myriad stories of outrageous demands and near-misses when it comes to buying and selling players – from Eden Hazard and Luis Suárez to more recently Luis Díaz and Conor Gallagher, which some ascribe to Levy’s hard bargaining. He never blinks and he will bombard people with emails and messages trying to get the deal done.
Spurs’ bid for Luis Díaz in January 2022 was rejected by Porto and the forward signed for Liverpool days later Credit: AP Photo/Jon Super
Levy has even had to step away and delegate at the last minute – as with Gareth Bale’s £85.5 million world-record sale to Real Madrid – because it got too tense, while there are those who believe his aggressive attitude towards deals is influenced by the fact that he made most of his money in the property boom.
“So do you think you’re more painful to deal with than a hip replacement?” asked a student during the Q&A at Cambridge, citing a quote from Sir Alex Ferguson relating to the Dimitar Berbatov deadline-day transfer in 2008. “Maybe,” Levy said, with a smile, although it should also be noted that he and Ferguson remain friends.
Even so there are those who say following the Berbatov transfer and, later, after allowing Kyle Walker to join City, Levy vowed never again to sell to the Manchester clubs. It is partly why City were turned down in their attempt to sign Kane and United never really tried to recruit him, despite being desperate to do so on several occasions and knowing he would have joined them.
What is not in dispute is Levy’s workaholic nature. He barely sleeps. “Nothing moves at the club without him. He is working 18 hours a day and the only thing in the world for him is Tottenham,” says one associate. The stories are legendary of his obsessive nature: from logging on to the stadium TV webcam through his iPad at 6am every day to watch the progress of the new ground when it was being built and zooming in on anything he was unhappy with, to choosing the tiling for the concourses and going through the wine lists in hospitality.
Levy logged on to a webcam at 6am each morning to monitor the construction of Tottenham’s new stadium In fact, some at Spurs talk fondly about the period when the stadium was being built and how it distracted Levy and the board away from the actual football. That allowed the then manager Mauricio Pochettino, academy manager John McDermott – now the FA’s technical director – and Steve Hitchen, who was then Tottenham’s performance director, to get on with it.
Pochettino was undoubtedly the manager Levy had the best relationship with – the one he invested in the most, personally – and the Argentine brought the most success, including reaching the Champions League final in 2019. Famously, in his autobiography, the former captain Hugo Lloris chided Levy for handing the players luxury watches from IWC Schaffhausen – Spurs’ “official timing partner” – engraved with the word “finalist”.
Levy’s motivation? Lloris’s criticism was harsh as apparently lucrative contracts kicked in with Nike and shirt sponsors AIA for reaching the final, and not necessarily winning it, and he wanted to reward the players for that achievement. Instead it reinforced the perception that he was a “numbers man” more concerned with the finance than the football.
That is strongly disputed by those who point out that Levy then employed José Mourinho and Antonio Conte, against his usual “project manager” approach, expressly and expensively to win. That did not work either. Tellingly, and despite the team’s struggles, he has stuck with Ange Postecoglou – for now – because he likes him as well as being sympathetic to the factors that have contributed to such a difficult season. Maybe, also, he sees a fellow fighter or, once again, he wants to do things his way.
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