What’s next for Daniel Levy?
We all know the feeling of working on a major project — a thesis, a piece of work, a personal endeavour — and how it comes to dominate our lives. Hour after hour, day after day, thinking about essentially the same thing, obsessing over the details, pushing yourself to go one step further. It feels like a burden, but it also gives you an edge, a focus, a sense you are accomplishing something.
And then it ends.
For a few days, you can relax and catch up on much-needed sleep, but soon the restlessness begins: the days seem longer, empty almost, and you starting thinking: “What’s next?”
For Spurs chairman Daniel Levy, this moment is approaching.
For more than a decade, building a new stadium for Spurs has been Levy’s obsession. White Hart Lane was a limiter on Tottenham’s ambitions and ability compete, and any dispassionate chairman of the club would have understood that it needed a bigger and better stadium. But I’m not quite sure as fans we understand how hard building a 62,000-seat stadium in a densely populated area of north London has been: it has required an extraordinary effort to acquire the land, obtain the approvals, secure the funding and overcome the objections. Mere commercial need isn’t enough of an incentive to have gotten this far with this stadium — most rational people would have either negotiated a ground-share with West Ham at the Olympic Stadium or tarted up White Hart Lane, and called it sufficient progress.
Of course, the stadium’s not quite done yet. We’re into the “Challenge Anneka” phase of the project, where the huge workforce will be frantically putting the finishing touches to ensure readiness for the next Premier League season. “Phase Three”, the housing and hotel development next to the South Stand, must be completed; there’s also the small matter of finding a naming partner and filling the £150m financial black hole in the project. But in terms of the day-to-day input, short of picking cheeses for the cheese room, the number of decisions Levy has to make should start to reduce.
All of which makes me wonder: what is Levy going to focus on in its place?
1. Winning the Premier League, and other silverware
If the new stadium is Levy’s signature achievement of his tenure running Spurs, his biggest failure has been a shortage of silverware. Spurs have only challenged seriously for the Premier League twice, and in truth Spurs were more “best of the rest” than true challengers capable of taking Leicester (it really happened) and Chelsea down to the wire. We’re now onto eight FA Cup semi-final defeats in a row — cruel and unusual punishment for Spurs fans — and are yet to go further than the quarter-finals of European competition in the ENIC era.
So on the field, there’s a lot of progress still to be made — and understandably many fans will argue that this should be Levy’s focus.
But, what does that look like in practice?
I’ve recently been watching “All Or Nothing,” which follows an NFL team for a season (Manchester City will be part of a Premier League version soon). In the latest season, it has followed the Dallas Cowboys, whose owner, Jerry Jones, is as hands-on as it gets, acting as general manager, participating in coaching meetings, and addressing players. It comes across as obsessive, weird and counterproductive, and as a viewer I’m watching it and thinking “now that seems a pretty good explanation of why the Cowboys haven’t been in a Super Bowl for decades”.
Do we really want Levy interfering with the dressing room and undermining Mauricio Pochettino’s tactics? His influence on recruitment is already arguably too great — but understandable in context of the budget constraints caused by stadium construction. If his only focus was on making the team better, what on earth would he actually do all day?
As chairman, his role is to set the strategy — the type of football he wants the team to play and the model of team building to follow — then find the right manager and give him the resources to execute that vision. It’s taken him a few goes, but Levy has found his man in Pochettino. Spurs also have the best training ground in the country, one of the strongest academies with a wealth of coaching talent, and top medical facilities (whether these are being used properly is another question). This summer, Levy will have to find more money for Pochettino’s recruitment ambitions, but other than that, much of what Spurs need for success is already in place.
The truth is, Spurs are doing almost everything right — it’s a textbook example of how to build a club into a contender. But the Premier League isn’t a fair fight — both Manchester City and Chelsea have had more than £1 billion pumped into them, while Manchester United and Liverpool have been beneficiaries of the global boom of the Premier League that has enabled them to turn historical success — recent or otherwise — into gold
There’s no way of guaranteeing taking that final step from contender to winner — and obsession (and interference) may be more of a hindrance than a help.
2. Fixing the third revenue stream
Levy is a financially driven man. Trying to think about the “what’s next” question from his perspective, Premier League clubs have three primary revenue streams: TV, matchday and commercial. With Spurs a regular top four contender, Levy can say he’s maximised the TV revenue stream, and the new stadium does likewise for matchday revenue. That leaves commercial revenue.
I built some charts to demonstrate how far Spurs have lagged behind the rest of the top six in this regard, although, per the last set of accounts, Spurs have at least managed to reduce the speed the gap is growing.
In a more simple way, Chelsea’s Nike kit deal is twice as valuable as Tottenham’s, while you can see the difference in commercial muscle just by comparing the “Our Partners” sections of the websites of Liverpool and Spurs.
The new stadium will help, with the myriad of new commercial revenue generating opportunities it provides (sponsorship, event hosting, etc..). Regular Champions League football will help. Having some of the most marketable stars in world football in the team will help. Links to the NFL and exposure to US market may help.
But it still feels there is more work to be done. Chelsea, for example, have been ultra aggressive in tearing up deals to replace them with bigger ones; for Spurs, it feels that, this side of the business has fallen down the pecking order with a stadium to build. The inability to land a naming rights partner — so far — shows it’s not easy. But with borrowing surging above the stated £400m mark (one source whose information and judgement I trust puts it at £560m), there’s every need for Levy to turn his attention to securing more commercial partners and increasing the amount of money Spurs can get out of them.
3. Looking beyond the First Team
Is there work to do at Spurs beyond the first team? Of course, it depends on what your view of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club is — is it the XI men you see on the pitch twice a week? Or is it something bigger than that? There’s no right answer — it’s personal opinion — but for me, I lean towards the latter.
Spurs already do tremendous work in the community, and have been recognised for these efforts. But, given the club’s reach and resources, there is potential to do more — an expansion of youth coaching networks, community and fan engagement, and so forth.
More resources have been put into Spurs Ladies, and this season the team played in the second tier of the WSL for the first time. One of the biggest growth areas of football in the next decade will be the women’s game — and from Tottenham’s perspective, a relatively small investment now in facilities, players and coaches may enable the club to catch up with the likes of Manchester City and Chelsea. Manchester United have recently woken up to the fact they have missed the boat on women’s football — as the game grows, narrowing the gap will become harder. Levy has spoken about how ultimately he is a steward of the club — as his thoughts turn to the next decade and beyond, more time spent on Spurs Ladies is surely appropriate.
Beyond football, Levy may seek to exploit the NFL partnership further. The Carolina Panthers franchise was sold in the past week for $2.3bn, the first franchise to change hands in four years — the talk of Spurs (or rather, let’s be clear, Joe Lewis) securing an NFL franchise to play in the new stadium seems extremely optimistic given the costs, limited opportunities and challenges in getting a deal done.
As a different idea, Nigel Wray, the owner of Saracens, a hugely successful rugby team based in North London, is looking for new investors after the previous co-owners ended their partnership. Like most Premier League rugby clubs, Saracens lose money — up to £3m per year in recent years. But this is quite modest given Spurs is hugely profitable, and a couple of sold-out European games at the new stadium would quickly plug this hole. Shahid Khan’s aggressive move for Wembley is reminder that the NFL partnership is only a small piece of the jigsaw, and a stadium built for American Football will also be perfect for rugby.
Running the stadium and ensuring it is exploited to its full potential in a competitive London market will be a huge challenge, but with much of this work likely outsourced, this alone won’t be enough to fill Levy’s time. And it frankly feels a little below his pay grade.
4. Step back, or step away?
There will come a time when Daniel Levy steps back, or steps away entirely. It will be an important moment for Spurs — for better or worse, he has shaped the direction of the club for 17 years.
Several years ago, Levy reportedly wanted to step back for personal reasons but was persuaded by Joe Lewis to remain in place. Since this period, he hasn’t slowed down a bit: he attends almost every game, home and away; he remains in tight control of all transfer activity; and his obsession with the stadium is best summed up by the story of him travelling around London testing out the various lifts in the capital’s skyscrapers to see which were most suitable for the new venue. Aged 56, this isn’t a man about to pack it all in and focus on his golf game.
However, for an experienced businessman with considerable personal wealth who sits inside Lewis’ sprawling investment empire, there are opportunities beyond football. There will surely come a point when Levy tires of navigating the shark-infested waters of the football transfer market, tires of thousands of people getting sniffy about his bonus and shouting at him in the stands, not to mention being the object of weird blog posts like this.
Perhaps first we’ll see Levy step back, remaining chairman but leaving more of the day-to-day decision making to club executives and senior football staff. Spurs sold one consented residential scheme at 500 White Hart Lane, but there are other irons in the property fire — for example a site near White Hart Lane station currently used as a yard for the stadium construction. There are major development plans in Haringey, although whether there is a money to carrying them out after the left-wing extremists in control of the local council finish indulging their Trotskyist fantasies is a question mark. But for an experienced developer like Levy — and that’s what he is at this point — there are opportunities to leverage the influence of Spurs into new schemes.
My hope is that Levy doesn’t allow the club to drift while he figures out “what’s next”, or becomes complacent in expecting the stadium alone to be a silver bullet that takes Spurs from contender to winner. Even just writing this sentence makes me think: this doesn’t sound like Levy.
When speaking at the Nasdaq during last summer’s US tour, there was a Wengerish tone to his comments bemoaning the cost of player acquisitions and how the league was experiencing a bubble. But since then, a new domestic TV deal has been mostly agreed, which if not inflating the pot, demonstrates sustainability. Global TV rights show no sign of slowing.
Pochettino clearly picked up on Levy’s reluctance to accept the new financial reality in his end of season comments challenging his boss to show more ambition. How Levy responds this summer will tell us what the “post-stadium” Spurs era will look like.
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