The Letter to the Chairman
Dear Mr Levy,
I’ve not done this for quite some time. This being; penned a letter addressed to you that is shared in the ether of social media. I know that in the past some of my blogs have found their way into the inner circle at the old White Hart Lane. Raised a few laughs, I’ve been told. Can I break the fourth wall? The letters, the blogs of the past have been satirical, nothing more, nothing less. A parody of the often disturbed and distorted fandom our supporters, the clubs fanbase, create with knee-jerking aplomb. They were never truly meant for you.
Often the anchor of these pieces is that ‘we’, the great unwashed, do not appreciate what we have. The thing is, during the Pochettino era, it was nigh impossible to take the p*ss out of anything. Why? Because Tottenham had finally arrived. Spurs had finally pushed beyond the wall they always hit with brutal force, collapsing in a broken mess.
And now?
Well, the satire is exclusively in-house.
The parody isn’t the conflict the supporters have, arguing about progression and trophies and what constitutes true success and whether belonging is more important yadda yadda yadda. Nope. There is no comedy to be found here. No source material I can use to make a mockery of us.
But as for you? The club, beyond the badge, and the eternal subconscious (or is it conscious) sabotaging of our evolution?
The content here is rich. It’s a majestic meme making machine.
Alas, it isn’t funny though. I mean, sure, in terms of self-deprecation and 1k retweets, it’s outstanding. For rival supporters, it’s LOL. But it’s not funny funny, when sat alone contemplating it without the echo chamber of Twitter telling you what to think. Unless you tag it as a black comedy/tragi-comedy sketch show. It’s still not ha-ha funny. It’s more smash my head head against the wall funny. Slap-stick snuff movie levels of funny.
So this isn’t a banter blog, this letter to you.
It’s from the heart and it will hopefully engage the serotonin in your brain. No caricatures and cheap shots. This is an honest emotional assessment from myself, someone often labelled a paragon of perspective, but really only an ordinary bog-standard Tottenham fan. I’m not even a vblogger ffs.
My single weakness is that I love this football club so much, I find myself flirting with blasphemy when I delve deep into criticising it. This club, afterall, * is * the fanbase and I struggle to distinguish the vast difference between the supporters and the history and traditions that the club itself (the owners - you) is responsible for as custodians.
Except it isn’t, is it?
The club isn’t the fanbase. Not really. Not anymore. Not for a long time. We’re the butter for the bread that gets covered in Marmite. We are a commodity. Faceless assets that only gain relevance in numbers. Usually our direct debit digits.
This is the glue that sticks all the other flaws together. The fact that all we want is acknowledgement and not assimilation.
Let’s start…
‘Stop doing just about enough to stay competitive enough to be seen to be catching up, and start behaving like a football club that wants to get ahead’.
I’ve repeated this statement many times recently. This is ground zero for the sabotaging. The reality that for all the tangible progress we’ve made since ENIC took over, we have always fallen short in cementing consistency.
Now I’m happy to accept that football isn’t the same beast it was 20+ years ago. It’s changed. And trophies tend to be bossed by a very select group of super rich clubs, a fair few that have been doped into strong positions of power. I’m also content in agreeing that our club was an absolute mess post-Irving Scholar.
In relative terms on the pitch, THFC was comfortably floating in mediocrity like a log that can’t get flushed. We had no direction, no real essence of what it meant to truly be competitive. Winning the odd cup was akin to say Hull City winning the odd cup.
As fans we always wanted more. We got plenty of stick for it; for dreaming. Chasing down the gulf the Sky Sports Top Four had was often pure fantasy. I’m also going to accept that as Spurs fans, we’re always going to be critical of everything and delude ourselves into believing no other club suffers as much as us. Which simply isn’t true.
The problem isn’t that we eventually eradicated the gulf on and off the pitch and have hit a self-imposed wall. The problem isn’t even the fact that we haven’t won more than two cups during your tenure. Some will say this is exactly the issue. But I’m not going down that road, arguing about the semantics of ‘what if?’ and had we got passed countless semi-finals and did better in the finals we lost and so on.
The crux of it all is that it’s not in the details. It’s not the manager making tactical and selections errs at key moments. Nor is it in the lack of player acquisitions at the right time.
I mean, of course it’s both these two things, but we need to get to a higher level of understanding. Because had we made the right decisions on and off the pitch, we might have still lost all of those games.
HOWEVER (capitalised and bold because it needs to be) if we, as a club, emphasised and amplified the desire to led by the football, to prioritise the football - as a fanbase, we’d have everything we need. A team, a club - that is trying to succeed and trying to win - at all costs.
The details are the product of the governance at hand.
Perhaps you believe you’ve done this during your time in N17. That you have pushed for us to be successful on the pitch by doing the maths off it.
It’s a wholly divisive debate. More is always required, there’s always an excuse or scapegoat (sometimes it’s the manager and not you).
There is no gauranntte of being successful. You can’t just assume because of X Y and Z that things will definitely happen. But the variables at play need to be controlled or at the very least be heavily influenced. What you have done consistently as a chairman is create obstacles within the club. It’s hard enough fighting our rivals in the upper echelons, but having to fight our own demons constantly will always hold us back.
We make it constantly tricky because we constantly fail to own the moment and do so with the understanding that failing in any measure is not something that can be swept under the carpet and forgotten about.
Stratford is distant memory. The long and winding road of the journey to get to completing the new Stadium was messy. There was plenty of missteps, mostly in PR with the paying supporters (you’ll know them as customers). I’m not going to pretend to understand the monumental work required to build a new home and everything that goes with it.
Let’s be honest, it would be a short letter of complaint to you if I did understand it. What you project managed (as calamitous as we pretend it to be) was a massive massive undertaking. We were warned the post-effect would be painful. Look across the Seven Sisters for further evidence.
I do understand that you are a no-sh*t negotiator and a perfectionist. People reading this might laugh at that latter bit. But you are. Perhaps too finely tuned into doing things in a very deliberate and emotionally void fashion. Too centric to the essence of the business and not the football.
THFC is now a brand, a stadium for football and NFL and boxing and practically anything that generates money via hype and bums on the seat (ignoring COVID). A billion dollar club house for your investment and with the potential to maximise it further for that pension defining sale at some point in the far future.
Amazing right?
You’ve done all this not because of a dynasty of success on the field but because of the loyalty of the fans off it. The Client Reference IDs. That same fuel for fantasy that kept us going when we finally pushed and broke through in 2006. You were able to do this BECAUSE of the clubs history and stature, a club that could still sign players and attract capacity crowds - even without the Sky money and the rest. That’s a pretty decent foundation to build on.
We want the very best for Spurs. It’s important fans have a identity, philosophy, ethos. But it will count for very little if the club does not act as a reflection for these desires.
And this is where it all ties in.
Everything we’ve done and done well has been almost accidental. A consequence of failure. You might think it’s more of a continuation of the learning curve, but at some point you have to graduate instead of watching the team repeat a year, being constantly schooled by others that just ‘get the job done’.
From Jol to Redknapp to Pochettino, there was progression. There was a focus to keep taking steps forward and upwards. But there was a naivety there too. Which I can also be accepting of. The experimentation of a Director of Football is a prime example but one that didn’t sync with the appointed coach. But can I be accepting of it if nothing is being learnt? If we keep choosing to reset, reboot and repeat?
Sacking Jol for Ramos was ambitious but ultimately flawed. Yet we won a cup. Not exactly by design. You wanted something more, you wanted experience. It was the right idea and the wrong execution. That trademarked paradox you have truly made your own. But football is about that risk and the gamble. Sometimes you need to look beyond the present. I don’t know, sometimes I imagine a bald Neo in the Matrix stopping bullets, seeing beyond the code.
Harry was the back to basics solution. He was exactly what we needed even if I, along with others, were not sure. Kudos. But, well, the mess was your own to clean up.
AVB was the science project that blew up the class room.
Poch wasn’t accidental at all, in terms of you giving him the job post-Sherwood debacle. But he was the right fit for the tight squeeze that was about to kick in with the stadium. I guess it’s typical Spurs that we go unbeaten at WHL and then knock it down to play football at Wembley.
Did we expect him to galvanise us to the extent he did? No. But football doesn’t always necessarily go by the proposed script. And when something spectacular happens, you can not settle with this as some ilk of defining success. You have to see it as a miracle of opportunity and make sure it persists. Because chances are far and few between. I mean, this is specific to us because of that platform you’ve built. You want us to be a big club. We have to behave like one ON the pitch first.
We want to play good football at the very top level. If you keep doing this, then the likelihood is, something will eventually happen. We’ll break through again. If you don’t respect the structure for consistency, then it all comes unstuck.
What did we do?
We shut up shop for two transfer windows and didn’t buy a soul whilst selling our own to the devil.
We know Poch was often stubborn with targets. We also know you have often bought players without the approval of the manager. Remember the infamous Redknapp window, the Saha one?
The Bale money was spent on players that AVB didn’t actually need to fit into his fragmented blueprint.
Poch’s team faded, burnt out, after an extraordinary period of some of the best football I’ve seen from Spurs in my lifetime. But was this the plan? The intentional distraction whilst we suffered through the delays of the new stadium?
It feels like it.
I will continue to ignore the complexities of the project you oversaw. So I can continue with this letter.
Once again, we settled with contending, with almost nearly getting there. Now maybe we are always, perpetually, over-achieving. That perhaps financially, you had to do what you had to do. But this is a feeble excuse. Surely, the best method to expand a brand and its value is the success on the pitch?
But it’s a gamble right? It’s risk.
You know that Tottenham can go another 20 years with only one or two cups and still be one of the most valuable football entities on earth. Which is insane and also proof of just how big and bad the industry has got. So big and bad, the football is an off-shot of the real game. Merchandising and franchising to a global audience.
We all think you’re a bit too comfortable in that metaphorical bed. Tucked up nice and neatly. You’re never going to fall out of it. You know that no matter what happens, you’ll be alright. No night terrors for you.
Midtable mediocrity will raise it’s hand to disagree.
Sleep paralysis for us.
But even with our current depressing plight, we all know deep down we’ll be back in amongst the Champions League positions. Not this season, but probably the next and the one after. But that’s back in at the same level we currently choose to exist in. Just about competitive to work below the super rich. Is it because of those riches the likes of City and Chelsea have that makes it almost impossible to compete season in and season out?
Losing the likes of Kyle Walker was the beginning of the end to our rampant wing back style. But even so, it will always come back to that moment - the eye of the storm - where you know what we have is special. So rather than take it for granted, you absolutely solidify the f*ck out of it. Take no prisoners.
Are we still stuck in the process of being able to be get that true position to match those above us? Are these years meant to be the difficult ones because of the stadium move and the loans and the search for naming rights? That Poch gave us hope that we were not meant to experience? That Harry Kane and his goals had tricked us into believing we could have had it all. A league title, a Champions League cup.
The fact is, at no point has this club truly made a statement of intent to get it done on the pitch. We’ve allowed ourselves to be constrained by internal obstacles. Not just financial barriers. It’s a state of mind.
Whereas others have generated the momentum to push up many levels by consolidating the true worth of any given team; the players. By purchasing better players.
What do you do instead?
You seek to sell our best players, caught up in a self-fulfilling prophecy. Take Modric or Bale and possibly now Harry Kane. They get sold on, so we can ‘rebuild’ and get back to the exact same position which will conclude with has having to sell again to rebuild again. Forever catching up, never getting ahead.
Why? Because the stature of the brand and club in terms of the ability to generate revenue from all manners of events is a priority above and beyond the one that involves the little footie team.
I guess I should also ignore that the type of players we have needed have been beyond our capabilities. Signing players on contracts worth hundreds of millions whilst dealing with the new stadium is probably the bit I do understand about the project management you undertook. Still, we keep breaking our transfer record, so colour me confused.
Poch, he had to go in the end. Our form, the loss of identity, it was the conclusion from that lack of leadership from the board where we needed it most. That statement of intent to consolidate was never forthcoming. We keep pushing towards being a proper big club. We don’t even bottle it because we aren’t really trying to get there. We are falling short in preparation. In another world, another dimension, you’d have back him (Poch) or the both of you would have realised the importance of strengthening at our very peak rather than waiting for us to fall back down to earth.
I know you’re thinking that many fans wanted the manager gone and blamed him as much if not sometimes more than they blamed you. Some even called out for Jose at the time. There’s always more to a story, to a relationship. More than we’ll ever be cursed to see on a streaming service.
The manner in which Dembele left and wasn’t replaced. The aforementioned Walker departure. Eriksen being held onto, again, for the sake of money rather than the team. The ageing legs of other key players. The sheer tiredness from the growth and maturity achieved, physically and mentally. It was exhausting. And perhaps that CL Final was the moment it all died and we simply refused to let go.
Then we got treated to the Dybala image rights saga. The Fernandes that didn’t sign probably because we didn’t sell Eriksen and couldn’t do a nice clean maths sum. Keep the accountancy on point, whilst the team struggles to win points, right?
Again, I do appreciate that the building of a billion pound stadium is going to dominate all finances. But enough to stop us fixing up and looking sharp in areas of the team that are suffering and eroding? Or are we all naive to the complexities I keep referring to, that are part and parcel to owning a football club?
Then came the appointment of Jose Mourinho. Oh boy. Oh boy.
The most un-Tottenham manager you could wish to pluck from the options available. A rebranded, new look, new man Jose. Or maybe just an illusion? Another attempt by yourself to prolong the essence of something that was broken. Another distraction. A celebrity appointment. A man often perceived as being bigger than the club he’s at. And why him? Because apparently he could get the best out of the players we had. I guess, based on the assumption there would be little money to spend on new players.
COVID hit. Furlough frolics followed. Let’s not forget our humiliation will be televised with the Amazon Prime documentary. By the way, what exactly was the thought process here? 2/3 years ago, fair enough, but this season? When we’re on a downward spiral? Can you not see how we can see the obvious detachment you have from us - the fanbase?
But again, business leads ahead of the football. It’s astonishing, you sat in front of a camera to validate whatever (say sacking Poch) for the sake of what? Reality TV? A bit more money for the coffer? We started the year with forest fires and it looks like we’re ending it with one too. An entire f**king rainforest!
I fully expect the theme music to this docu to be HBO’s ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ whilst I curb myself from jumping in the bath with a toaster plugged in.
Jose’s task is mammoth and unlike anything he’s ever had to contend with in the past. It’s not his remit. He needs hundreds of millions. Maybe you both know this? Maybe you’ve discussed everything we can see that is now playing out? That this job is for the long haul and at £15M per year, Jose is unlikely to get sacked.
Or do you now realise that if we haven’t got much going on in terms of competitiveness, then all we have left is the actual football. And if we don’t have the football - there is nothing for us to consume and digest and enjoy.
You what’s truly hilarious? Dare I say funny. Jose and his football, it isn’t something that will resonate with the global audience. This results based cesspit, this playing style that can’t even muster a shot on goal against Bournemouth. It isn’t sustainable. You can’t sell anything Tottenham off the back of it. I’m curious to know how long it will take before you realise this. Surely you know already.
The club to you and the club to us, it’s two different things. You have to meet us half way. You have to give people a reason to spend thousands of pounds on season tickets, food and drink and travel. You have to stop taking this for granted. Our loyalty. Our own hypocrisy, wanting you out of the club but still buying replica shirts and going to games. You might think we are all replaceable. That a next generation will stroll in and take everyone’s seats. That the new breed of fan, the ones that perceive the match day experience as a form of entertainment, have open wallets to be abused. Even they will not pay to watch dead football. The irony here is that many of the long standing supporters have been treated as consumers for so long, are now the very scourge of modern fandom, demanding silverware because of the cost of commitment being so high. Even to the detriment of our traditions.
I don’t know what I can suggest from the team management perspective. I think, as difficult as it is, this team needs to be broken up. You have to decide if retaining the services of JM will produce the output required to get us back to the benchmark set by our previous gaffer and some of the ones that proceeded him. Every fanbase wants to see their team compete and win things. Once again, I appreciate it isn’t easy. But all of us feel cheated if the club is turning its head away from stepping up to the fight.
You might have signed several top players during that period where nobody came in. We might have still ended up with nothing because of the inexperience of Poch. But, honestly, I think it would have made all the difference. Look at Liverpool as a prime example of wanting something, and together, grafting to get it.
Jose loves the short term, because that’s what he does best. Aided by a war chest. It feels like you think you got clever, that Poch having to go meant Jose was too good an option to pass by. Based on nothing but his past and his world famous reputation. Which is proving not so relevant in the present.
Could we have rebuilt under Poch? Or was he burnt out too? Was the relationship no longer working? Perhaps even in your defence, would we - the fans - have been accepting of a complete rebuild and the subsequent difficult times? Because, I know many fans wanted and welcomed the change out of sheer desperation to win something. So, don’t fret, there are guilty ones amongst us too. But when you don’t know what’s going on, you tend to panic.
Mr Levy, am I even asking for that much? Are any of us?
Maybe you need to appoint a General Manager or Sporting Director (again). Maybe you should be honest, truly, in what the next five or ten years look from a financially perspective so we can understand how it will impact us on the pitch. Maybe I’m dreaming if I think any of us will be privy to this type of insight.
When you meet with the Trust to eat digestives or write club statements for the website, I don’t disbelieve that you don’t believe you’re doing the very best for Spurs. But I do believe you are as stubborn as any given fan or coach you’ve appointed. We do have money to spend, we’ve spent plenty. But then you do things that make little sense by not spending that money when it needs to be spent.
No Champions League football and potentially no Europa either. It proves how tentative all of this, our form and the form of others can result in loss of revenue. So your business mantra is hardly full proof which makes it all the more maddening that the football isn’t the priority.
So please make sense of it all Mr Chairman. Stop finding ways to prolong this journey of progress. Make a leap of faith, one that is still calculated to your standards of perfection when it comes to the financial stuff. But one that is firmly anchored in pushing Tottenham, the team and its fans, into a position where we can only feel pride and not the anguish of dithering decision making and protracted transfer sagas. An echo of glory is still what it’s all about.
Be as ruthless as you were with the builders and electricians and everyone else you dealt with to get the stadium finished, when dealing with matters on the football side. You know what I’m referring to. There are some fascinating anecdotes that I will never share in the public domain that showcase just how much you do care - but it’s all lost in the ambiguity of output with the football stuff. You know, the bit that actually matters to the rest of us proles.
Our identity and our sense of belonging, it has to run through from the top to the bottom of this football club. At the moment, it’s toxic. We might still be privileged, to be Spurs fans, but as I keep repeating - we are not demanding to win things out of nothing. We want the club to make us believe that they believe in what we believe in. The rest is up to the tactics and selection and the willingness, determination and quality of the players. On the day. And then it’s up to us to support them with everything we have.
You strike me as a man that other people have to quickly shift out of the way when you’re walking down a corridor, otherwise like a little bullet, you would smash right through them. A man of extremely high standards with protocol and uniformed process. Don’t be him all of the time. Don’t walk right past us, without eye contact. Stop, smile and give us a hug. Reconnect. Then do so with actions and not words.
Yours without satire,
Spooky
TL;DR DO SOMETHING TOTTENHAM