What I suspect happened was that this "release clause" either wasn't as chiselled in stone as all were led to believe, and/or it had certain conditions eg. time limits for activation that weren't valid at the time of the bid.
Wouldn't surprise me either if the club have heard that the player would be interested in Spurs from source A, heard the release clause figure from source B, thought they could connect the dots and made a horlicks of it.
Whatever the case, whether the fat Greek was bluffing or not, there was obviously enough of a whiff of collusion and impropriety with the approach on our part that meant we totally backed down on it the past two weeks.
There is enough to castigate Levy over - the continued lack of real coherent vision, transfer policy, that at least 50% of this squad is still total dog muck, another total 180 on the manager front (the most boring, basic, middle of the road safe guy playing boring basic middle of the road pragmatic football after the last guy was seen as too extreme and out there).... but this one I don't think is on him.
Fault here I'm more inclined to say is with the recruitment/admin who have clearly totally cocked up the bid/approach.