Levy’s Neville chat proves he still doesn’t *get* Spurs and probably never will
The interesting thing about Tottenham chairman Daniel Levy’s lengthy chat with Gary Neville for The Overlap lies less in anything he says and more in the very existence of such a thing.
He has a lot of predictable opinions about state ownership and the like, and is very, very proud of his stadium. But none of that really matters.
What’s notable is that this is the second significant, lengthy public appearance from Levy this summer, following the now infamous interview with Tottenham’s in-house team in which he said Spurs ‘need to win the league’ before then embarking on another summer where he would (thus far) yet again fail to provide yet another new manager with anything like the necessary tools to do so.
The kind of wide-ranging interview he’s given Neville on what amounts to a personal tour of the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium marks a bigger step out of the comfort zone even than that. It is wildly out of character.
Neville:Levy isn’t exactly Frost:Nixon but having managed to accidentally make himself the story even with softball questions from his own media team, it’s still a bold choice to invite even the friendliest and least challenging of external interviewers in for another crack.
It’s clear that this summer above all others, Levy feels the need to explain himself. He has never previously felt anything like this keen to get his side of the story across, with his communications with the fans generally restricted to programme notes and the occasional open letter on the club website at the beginning of September and/or February, the content of which amounts to ‘Dear fans, we tried, it is hard, COYS, Daniel”.
Levy is brilliant in many ways, but an owner who instinctively gets and understands his football club and its fans he is not. And never has been. There is at times a sense of genuine bafflement that he isn’t more beloved for delivering this undeniably exceptional stadium facility.
Any time he mentions the Europa League success he follows it up with “which was great” or some other such qualifier. It sounds very much like he’s trying to convince himself rather than anyone else; that he simply cannot, on a fundamental level, understand why Tottenham fans were more excited about that than having an NFL pitch underneath the football pitch at their world-leading stadium.
And yet, the Europa League victory is a huge part of why Levy feels the need to go public this summer after deciding to get rid of the man who removed that albatross from around Tottenham’s neck.
Levy’s reasons for moving on from Ange Postecoglou are, in the cold light of day, entirely rational. Seventeenth was an absurd place to finish in the league, and the injury crisis was never as big a factor in that disastrous league form as was suggested. Even as the big names returned, the league form remained entirely moribund.
But the puzzle Levy cannot resolve in his businessman’s brain is that for the fans this was all fine. That that one night in Bilbao made everything else worth it. That Spurs fans, almost to a man, woman and child, would not for a single second consider swapping last season for another trophyless campaign and fourth-place league finish.
It’s not to say Spurs’ trophy drought was Levy’s fault, exactly. But at Spurs more than just about anywhere else the parameters of success as far as the club’s suits were concerned were very clear, and increasingly at odds with those of supporters who just wanted to feel that feeling of watching your team win a trophy again.
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Part of the reason Spurs’ trophy drought felt destined to continue was that they were so very clear in how they prioritised competitions where their chances of success – at least success measured by the harshest standard of ‘actually winning the thing’ – were lowest.
Spurs’ priorities every year have been the Premier League and Champions League – either by being in it or trying to get back into it.
The domestic cups have been nothing more than a distraction, and the evidence is clear. Managers come and managers go, but none of them have given the domestic cup competitions any serious attention in well over a decade now. Mauricio Pochettino wasn’t that interested in them, and nor has any manager since given them much heed. This has to be a message coming down from on high; by all means go and do well in these if you must, but they will not come up in your performance review.
Spurs haven’t been beyond the fifth round of the FA Cup since 2018 – an absurd state of affairs. They’ve done better – slightly – in the Carabao but the good runs Spurs have had in that competition have tended to coincide with some favourable draws.
Last season, Postecoglou and his daft team managed to contrive a situation where, for the first time ever under Levy’s stewardship, a scenario emerged into being where prioritising winning one of the ‘other’ trophies became the correct course of action for all aspects of the club, the business, and the fans.
So bad was Spurs’ league season that the chance of reaching Europe via the more orthodox route was out of the picture long before the Europa League reached the business (no pun intended) end.
Winning that trophy and the Champions League place that would come with it offered Spurs the chance to pull an absolute Homer to save their entire season. Against all Spursy logic, they did it.
And Levy still doesn’t seem to understand quite what happened or quite what it meant.
