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What is wrong at Spurs?

Do Spurs have fundamental structural and cultural problems that stop them winning trophies, regardless of who the manager is?  The idea that Tottenham prioritise profits over sporting success is a central argument of the ‘ENIC Out’ brigade.

Is it a fair one? That likely depends on your perspective. On one hand, Spurs have spent hundreds of millions of pounds in the past few years on transfers and last summer backed their head coach in a way they had never done previously. It’s hard to say a club don’t invest in the playing side when they have spent £60 million ($73.4m today) on a player in Richarlison who wasn’t even going to be an automatic starter.

On the other hand, owner ENIC’s critics say Spurs have stood still because they passed up opportunities to sign players who would have taken them to the next level — most pertinently during the Pochettino years when the hierarchy prioritised the stadium rebuild at the expense of squad additions when the team were coming agonisingly close to winning the biggest prizes.

This was where the argument over ENIC crystallised — the sense that infrastructure, such as building an elite training ground and then a stadium to match, was more important than trophy success on the pitch.   An argument made in The Times today is that Tottenham have ceased to be a football club and become an events destination.

Those who are pro-ENIC would argue that the two go hand in hand and that the owners have given Tottenham a much better chance of winning things in the future by laying down these very solid foundations. Remember as well that Spurs were in a comparable position to Everton, bobbing around in mid-table, before they started to make these kinds of investments. Now look at where the two clubs are.

Nowadays we see the profits-over-glory argument play out when Spurs are seen as prioritising events that maximise stadium income — this summer’s series of Beyonce and Lady Gaga concerts being seen by some as the most egregious.

Arguably people would care a lot less about these kinds of enterprises if results were better on the pitch. But when Spurs are continually failing to win things, it becomes easier to say that it’s partly down to warped priorities at board level. Do these commercial ventures really affect the playing side? It’s difficult to say definitively, but most neutral observers close to the situation point to the fact there’s a pretty clear delineation between the staff who focus on these sorts of matters and those who deal with the football ones.

What doesn’t help is when public statements such as the one by Levy at the start of last season appear to place undue emphasis on the commercial and even the non-profit community side. Referring to “boxing, NFL, rugby and concerts” in the second paragraph of his chairman’s message welcoming the fans back en masse after over a year of behind-closed-doors games due to the COVID-19 pandemic and talking so little about the actual football was seen by Levy’s critics as striking the wrong tone.

Conte will receive about £4m in severance pay: https://www.cityam.com/tottenham-hotspur-face-a-bill-of-4m-over-contes-departure-from-london-club/

 

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