Daniel Levy: to some, he is a saviour to others he is the Devils Incarnate.

 Daniel Levy: to some, he is a saviour to others he is the Devils Incarnate.

By Don Scully

So, what do we know about him?

Daniel Philip Levy was born on February 8th, 1962. Two days later Tottenham Hotspur thrashed Nottingham Forest 4-2. I don’t know if that was an omen or not. Looking it another way, seven days earlier, we had played Wolves, away, and lost 3-1. I am sure somebody can read something into that. Anyway…

Daniel is Jewish (a Yid), and is married to Tracy Dixon, and they have four children. He is also a British businessman and the Chairman of our Club. He has held this post since 2001 (19 years), which makes him the longest-serving Chairman in the Premier League.

The creation of our leader

Levy was born in Essex (an Essex Jewish boy). His father, Barry Levy, was a successful businessman. Probably where boy Daniel got his inspiration from. Daniel is a lifelong Tottenham Hotspur supporter and attended his first match at White Hart Lane against QPR in the 1960s. It is believed that he stood on the Shelf… it was probably then that he pontificated about his future role in this Club, as he surveyed all before him. His thoughts – maybe – where “All before me will be mine, and I envision a phoenix rising from the smouldering rubble of this stadium…  kneel”, Or maybe he was just thinking of his friend Neil… but maybe not!

As he grew up and ploughed his way through his schooling, he eventually went to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge and studied Economics and  Land Economy, finally graduating in 1985 with a First Class Honours Degree. All this must have been in good stead for somebody who had a vision of pulling down White Hart Lane and building in its place a money tree of an empire.

His vocation:

After graduating, Levy went into his family business. He was also involved in property development (handy!) as well as having several other activities on the go. He then formed a business association with Joe Lewis (no, not the boxer… who was called Joe Louis, different spelling, and he was dead!), and became involved in an investment trust called ENIC International Ltd. It specialised in football, entertainment and media. He was eventually made the managing director of ENIC in 1995. Daniel and his family own 29.4% of the share capital of ENIC, while Lewis owns 70.6%.

Daniel became a director of the Scottish Rangers. ENIC held a substantial stake until 2004. ENIC also held stakes in other European football clubs including AEK Athens, Slavia Prague, FC Basel and Vicenza (but all since sold because he wanted to concentrate on bigger fish; i.e. Spurs). He also has non-football companies such as Warner Bros Restaurants and a Cambridge software company, Autonomy.

Now we come to the piece de resistance; our Club.

With the Club on Daniel’s mind, he attempted to buy it from Alan Sugar in July of 1998. But the Sugarman was having none of it and rejected his offers. But if anything, Daniel was persistent. He made another offer in July 2000, but he was again told to… erm, well, it was rejected.

But all was not well in the Sugar Camp. Increasing aggression from the Spurs fans towards the Apprenticeship master eventually persuaded him to stick two fingers up at all those annoying Spurs supporters. He sold his 27% stake in the Club to ENIC. It cost them £22 million, bringing their total stake to 29.9%, the maximum permissible before ENIC had to bid for the entire company.

Daniel replaced Sugar as Chairman in February 2001 on the completion of the sale. He then took over the day-to-day running of the Club in October 2001. ENIC ultimately increase their shareholding and gained control of the company after buying the remaining shares off Sugar in 2007 for £25m. Looking back, that was a bargain.

ENIC  then moved the Club into private ownership in 2012. At the same time, our man Daniel then became the highest-paid Premier League chief executive, with an annual salary of over £6 million in the season of 2016–17. It was payback time for him. Now he could implement his vision and maybe get a statue of himself in honour of his achievements? He probably was thinking, if Michael Jackson, a lover of children, could get a statue of himself at Fulham (and he wasn’t into football, children is another story) then his efforts should have worshippers galore, along with a masterful statue of himself, to-boot. Only time, he must have been thinking, and the inevitable will happen.

One of the first things he did was he brought back Bill Nicholson to the fold.

The first manager he appointed was the Tottenham legend, Glenn Hoddle. This was in 2001. But it didn’t work out for Hoddle; he was eventually sacked following a poor start to the 2003–04. He was followed in quick succession by Jacques Santini and Martin Jol. Jol had some success moving Tottenham out of the mid-table but was dismissed in 2007 after the team only won one game in their first ten games. Sadly, this was things to come for the seeable future, unfortunately for us loyal, and much trodden on, supporters.

Then came Juande Ramos in 2008 as head coach. He delivered the League Cup, the first trophy under Levy's stewardship and the Club's first in nine years. We, delusional poor supporters (or is that bastards!), thought we had turned the tide, the Glory, Glory days were coming to us in bucket fulls.

But then Daniel decided to flex his muscles again and replace Ramos with Harry Redknapp. This was because Ramos had made his worst start to a league campaign in the Club's history. This was 2008/9. Along came ‘Arry. The ducking and diving football manager who had been around the block a few times. But it was a wise decision, even though no trophies followed.

Good old ‘Arry guided us to a top-four finish in the 2009–10 season, winning our entry into the qualification round of the UEFA Champions League for the first time. We then reached the knock-out stages in the 2010–11 UEFA Champions League but eventually lost to Real Madrid. In 2010/11 we finished fifth, missing out on a Champions' League qualification,  but instead got the bobby prize, a place in the Europa League. Thursday night football, here we come.

While all this was happening, Redknapp had his eye on the manager's job for England. The team started to slip; eventually, he got nothing. He was relieved of his responsibilities and departed, as all the others had done, with their tail between their legs. But some have argued that ‘Arry had put us on the right path. But what came next was a disaster. On the 3^rd July Daniel appointed former Chelsea and Porto boss Andre Villas-Boas as the team's new head guru. But like all good hopes – at Tottenham – it went the same way as all the other managerial inspirations went… down the plughole. Unsatisfactory results of the 2013/14 season, including a 5-0 thrashing at home by Liverpool, saw Villas-Boas walk the plank of doom. After that, Daniel’s bright ideas didn’t get any brighter, as he put in the ex-Chelsea managers place a rooky. Tim Sherwood was unveiled as the man to lead us to Glory; instead, he left at the end of the season. Another failure.

Then a bright spark of an idea arrived from Daniel’s cranium and on May 27th 2014 he pinched the Southampton manager Mauricio Pochettino to become another Tottenham savour.

In his phase as boss, things did start to look up. The team reached the 2015 Football League Cup Final in Pochettino's first season in charge which also saw a number of the Club's academy players establish themselves in the first team, including Harry Kane, Danny Rose, Ryan Mason, Nabil Bentaleb and Andros Townsend. Out of all those bright youngsters, only Kane survived. But the future was starting to look more vivid, and we could see a pinprick of light shining from the other end of the tunnel.

We qualified for Europe with a fifth-place finish in 2014–15 before challenging for the Premier League title in the 2015–16 and 2016–17 seasons with a squad consisting of the youngest average age in the division. Maybe not that season, but there was always next season, we thought. We were on a high. We hadn’t felt like this since Berkinshaw was our manager.

 We also achieved our best placing in 2016–17 since the 1962–63 season under Bill Nicholson. We had been ranked amongst the top 4 since the 2015–16 season, allowing us to qualify and participate in the Champions League since 2016–17. Then the piece de resistance finally came, in the season of 2018/9, we got to the final of the Champions League, where we faced Liverpool. From these dizzy heights, it was downhill all the way. On November 19th 2019, Pochettino was sacked as manager; basically, he was told to ffuu—on your bike! Being replaced the following day by José Mourinho – which tells you this was well planned in advance.

José did well on first arrival, then injury to crucial players caused a dip, and then virus came to his rescue.

In all that time, Daniel oversaw the construction of a new stadium; from its design to its installation. Eventually, on April 3^rd, 2019, it opened. This was going to be the beginning of a new era for us (albeit, when the stadium was paid off). He also must have been thinking; if the team should flounder because of a lack of funds (or because of poor managers, which he appointed), he always had other avenues to make those riches with the stadium, so all wouldn’t be lost. After all, without large amounts of income, there was less wealth for him.

While all this was happening, Daniel Levy needed to maintain a relatively modest wage structure at the Club. This was because some of their revenue had to be channelled to the Stadium project. Compared to the other big six clubs of the Premier League, we spent the least on wages among the top 6 and the lowest wage/revenue percentage of all clubs in the Premier League.

Daniel has described the spending by other clubs in the Premier League as unsustainable. However you see this argument; our inadequate spending had an inevitable effect on the Club; i.e. we couldn’t sustain our position and fighting ability to stay in the top four. Something had to give, and what gave saw our gradual decline down the ladder of the league table and also being knocked out of – eventually – all club competitions.  Even though, in the 2017–18 season, Tottenham made a profit of £113 million (£138.9m pre-tax), a world record for a football club. The Club was valued at around £80 million when ENIC first attempted to buy a stake in 1998, but by 2019, valuations of the Club had been roughly £1.6 billion (other estimates say a bit more).

Concerning transfers; Daniel Levy is the chief negotiator.  He has acquired a reputation for tough negotiation in the Club's transfer dealings; former Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson described negotiating with Levy over the transfer of Dimitar Berbatov as "more painful than my hip replacement".  He is also known for his last-minute dealings on the last day of the transfer window.

The Club often bought younger players, such as Christian Eriksen, Son Heung-min and Dele Alli before they become major stars. All this had saved the club money. In the first four years since Pochettino's appointment in 2014, the Club had a net spend of £29 million on transfer fees, considerably lower than the other major clubs in the same period.

Conclusion:

This is all well and good, and full credit to him for building such a magnificent stadium, one of the best in the world. But without a great team and trophies to go with it, we are just a hollow shell.  Even though that shell is one of the most outstanding stadiums of the modern era.

The fans are split over all this. Some say that he now needs time to pay off the clubs debts and the Glory days will eventually come. Others say that it is now time to splash the cash and build that invincible team. To his credit, he has replaced the stagnated Pochettinto with Mourinho so that we can go to the next level (hopefully).

If you look on Facebook, there is a dedicated page to get Enic and Levy out. But on the whole, the support for him to stay is in his favour. How long will that last and how long will the supporters keep turning the other cheek, only time will tell? Penny pinching now, for a reason, maybe ok, but there will become a time when we all will demand much more.

Your thoughts are welcome.

Keep your distance, watch out for each other, and before you can count Daniel Levy’s billions, we will be up and running, with Mourinho at the head of that charge. Then again, with all this shut down, and profits curtailed then it might be a few more years before our team can blossom to its potential… never mind, there is still the other profit-making enterprising we can visit to keep us happy; boxing, America Football, concerts, Executive meeting venues and so much wealth created opportunities for the stadium that people might one day say, “amongst all that wealth and glamour at the stadium there used to be a football team… but that was many, many years ago!” Or they might say, “out of that stadium and wealth many great and wonderful teams came that shook the footballing world.” Only time will tell. God bless Daniel Levy for his wisdom and enterprising chutzpah, and hope he makes the right decision for all us Spurs sakes’.