Between 6pm and 8pm is a busy time in my house while I make the dinner, answer 3500 from my 9 year old. pick up my 5 year old after his latest bike fall, run back into the house because the pasta water is overflowing so I do not go near my phone between maybe 6pm and 8pm. So when I finally got to bed I looked at my phone and I had over 340 Whatsapp messages on it.
Now the reason for the amount of Whatsapp messages is always Spurs. I am joined the local Spurs supporters club and we have a Whatsapp group. When you get 340 messages it means we have signed a player. But we could not have signed anybody as the transfer window shut last week. Then what could it be. Then I scrolled up and found out Daniel Levy had left the football club. This was huge.
Spurs fans do not like Daniel Levy as he is seen as a penny pincher, always tries to do deals. He fights over every penny and does not pay the high wages needed to attract players. So whenever Spurs are losing the camera pans to a sad looking Daniel in the directors box looking down while boos ring out around the stadium. In the supporters club Whatsapp, it got so heated in the summer than one of our long term supporters actually left the group and said he would not come back until Levy was gone. This was after the Eze drama , the Morgan Gibbs Whyte drama and Spurs just basically letting these players slip through our fingers rather than paying up the money in the first place. Now we all know players transfers are a bit more complicated than this and it is not just Levy but you can understand the fans frustration. We have a stadium that is making £5 million per home fixture and we were promised more purchase power when the stadium was built. Concerts , go karting , hotels you name it are bring in cash but yet Levy is not comfortable forking out for players wages.
There is one story with Bale going to Real Madrid for north of £100 million. Madrid representatives asked for a Tottenham Shirt with Bale on the back as a souvenir. Levy appartently added the price of the jersey in the bill for Bale. You have to laugh at this. If it is true it is very funny.
Now we laughed at how tight Daniel was but we are proud of the fact that he squeezed the last drop of money out of every club if they wanted to buy our players. In Alex Fergusons autobiography he said a hip replacement was less painful than dealing with Daniel Levy over the Berbatov deal.
But Daniel had an awful lot of good points which made me feel like better the devil that you know. He built the best stadium in the world. I visited there last year and he even made them change the fire extinguishers from red to navy as he did not want any red in the ground because of our arch rivals down the road. Daniel is a Spurs fan. The stadium is magnificent and a credit to him and he has set up Spurs for the next 100 years financially. This is a feat that previous chairmen like Alan Sugar and Irving Scholar could not do.
As well as this Spurs have the best training ground in the country and there is a hotel on sight that players can stay in if they wish. It is top class and all because of Daniel Levy and ENIC's investments. Levy is a great business man. Nobody doubts this and he is considered by other clubs the best chairman in the League. Man United would do well to have Levy at the helm.
Finishing 17th last season was not good and it is the reason why Ange was fired even though he won us a Europa League. The team were terrible last year and lost 22 games in the Premiership. Joe Lewis who owns the club handed over the club to a trust but it is said that his family were concerned that Tottenham were not performing under Levy so they wanted their own man to join the board. Enter Peter Charrington, a merchant banker who lives in the ENIC compound in Barbados. He send in an independent auditor to review everything. Donna Cullen , Levy's right hand woman was the first to go. Then they hired Vinai Venkatesham in a move that surprised some. Vinai is a people person who was hired to bring the fanbase and the club closer together. This would be the opposite of the way the club was run under Levy. So it was interesting to see Daniel go in front of the cameras with Vinai and with Gary Neville where before he only ever answered questions in the Cambridge Union address and a hand picked fans forum at the start of every season where everything is rosy. The family were concerned we have not won enough in Levy's tenure and Joe Lewis's golden boy was no longer the families golden boy. Change was needed.
Spurs transfer window finished ok but the Eze and MGW deals should not have happened and even after winning a European Cup 2 months ago , the fanbase were once again calling for Levy's head. And this time the prayers were answered. Daniel stepped down as executive vice chairman . He will be replaced by Peter Charrington but he steps into the role as a non executive chairman. Now Levy still owns 30% of Spurs with the rest being the Trust but rumour has it the Qatari's are coming in and Daniel will sell his shares. We will see in a few weeks but for now we are all celebrating he is gone.
Personally I do feel a bit sorry for him because I know deep down he had the best interests of Spurs to heart. If you look at the figures and net spends, Tottenham have one of the highest spends on transfers in the League. It was more the wages that Levy would not pay. He suffered no fools and in a way when you look at Man United and that clown show , you kind of have to admire the way he ran the club. In my own job I have to keep an eye on spending and if it was up to my stakeholders we would be bankrupt years ago. Spurs are the best run club in the country and you can see it in our finances and FFP. Levy has built solid foundations which we hope will be built on so Spurs can go in and win more.