The new order at Spurs

Six months ago, no Tottenham Hotspur fan, unless they had a particular interest in wealth management, would be able to tell you who Peter Charrington was.  But after a dramatic week, Charrington is the name on everyone’s lips. On Thursday afternoon, he stepped into the role of non-executive chairman. It was the start of a new era at Spurs.

Charrington himself has been learning the ropes of the football industry over the last six months, especially since Venkatesham arrived. Charrington’s background is not in sport but in private banking. He spent 26 years at Citibank and made his name at Citi Private Bank, which manages the money of high-net-worth individuals. He ran its operations in the UK and North America before becoming Citi Private Bank’s global head from 2014 to 2020. He won ‘Best Leader in Private Banking’ at the 2019 Global Private Banking Awards.

It was not just Charrington’s professional expertise that led him to Spurs, but also his relationship with the Lewis family. Charrington is a long-standing confidante and adviser to Tottenham’s majority shareholders. And after he left Citi in 2020, his next move was directly into the Lewis family operation. In 2022, Charrington became a senior partner at Nexus Luxury Collection, the luxury resort and hospitality company the Lewis family co-founded with Tiger Woods and Ernie Els. This meant having a base in the Bahamas, where the Lewis family have their Albany resort.

The real point is about structure and governance, and the difference between a non-executive chairman and an executive one.

For the last 24 years, Tottenham Hotspur was structured in a very particular way. Levy was not a traditional chairman, but one who ran the whole club from the top down, along with his most trusted allies. He was across everything, a slave to the details, and not afraid to get his hands dirty with the finer points of negotiation, especially on transfers. He truly put the ‘executive’ in ‘executive chairman’. Levy was executing the work of the business every day for 24 years.

Over time, this arrangement made Tottenham stand out from their rivals, especially as other Premier League clubs moved to a more classic corporate structure — where the non-executive chairman is the backstop, someone who oversees the actions of the CEO, makes sure that the executives are doing their jobs, but does not get their hands dirty with the day-to-day running of the club.

This more traditional system is where Tottenham have ended up. It is why Charrington’s role is so different from Levy’s. In football terms, you could not call it a ‘like-for-like replacement’. Charrington will not Charrington will not be running the finer points of the club in the way that Levy used to.

Under such a structure, the most important person in daily operations is not the chairman, but the CEO. Venkatesham is in charge of running the club. He will become responsible for driving the strategy and making the decisions every day.    Charrimgton will bring a calm and experienced head to the new management team.

Other movers and shakers

Joe Lewis’s daughter Vivienne, 63, regularly attends matches at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium and was seen sitting alongside Levy for the opening game of the season against Burnley. Known as “Viv” around the club, she and her brother Charles were handed the keys to the family business when her father put it into a family trust in 2022. Vivienne is senior managing director of her father’s private investment company, Tavistock Group, and sits on its board of directors. Vivienne likes art and has worked with her father to maintain the Lewis Collection, which is one of the most prestigious private collections in the world.

Charles Lewis is a year younger than Vivienne and, like his sister, is also a senior managing director of Tavistock and sits on the board. With a particular interest in the leisure sector, he has played a leading role in more than 150 award-winning restaurants in North and South America and owned the Hard Rock Café business in the Caribbean and South America. Charles previously worked alongside Levy in the early 2000s and has been based in various locations, including London, Buenos Aires, Los Angeles and the Bahamas. Like Vivienne, he is described by sources close to the Lewis family as an avid Tottenham supporter with a heartfelt interest in the success of the team.

Vinai Venkatesham will take over from Levy as the man in charge of the day-to-day running of the club. He was appointed Tottenham’s new chief executive in April, a move that shocked his former colleagues at Arsenal. After starting out as an oil trader, Venkatesham moved into sport as a commercial manager working on the lead-up to the London Olympics and then at Arsenal, first as head of global partnerships and then later as managing director and chief executive, when he played a key role in Arsenal’s transformation under Mikel Arteta. A strong communicator, with good judgment, Venkatesham is now tasked with overseeing a similar period of change at Tottenham.

Supporters' Trust statement

On Friday the club’s official supporters’ trust issued a statement. “The surprising departure of Daniel Levy after 24 years as executive chairman of the club provides the new leadership with the ideal opportunity for deepened engagement with fan groups on the future direction of the club,” the statement read. “They should take it."

“Daniel’s legacy is self-evidently the construction of the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium [THS], widely regarded as one of the finest football stadia in the world, as well as related infrastructure such as the training ground. Building such a stadium in the dense, urban heart of our home, Tottenham, is no mean feat.

“While some may still hanker after the more intimate White Hart Lane, it is clear that THS was needed to allow Tottenham Hotspur to compete on an equal footing with Europe’s football elite. Our thanks go to Daniel for his vision and drive in delivering the stadium."

“And yet, the laser focus on cost and value for money necessary for completing the stadium didn’t serve the club so well on the pitch. Our members and other respondents to our annual surveys consistently over many years valued the club’s development off the pitch but wanted greater focus on the football.”

“Genuine fan engagement didn’t come naturally to Daniel. While on paper there was commitment, in practice this often meant telling us what the club planned to do at short notice.”