January has been a difficult month for Tottenham Hotspur, to put it mildly. The Premier League results have been disastrous, with Spurs taking just three points from five games, none against top sides. The defining sound has been booing. That negativity has corroded Frank’s standing at Spurs over time. What no one knows today is the impact of Wednesday’s triumph on Sunday’s mood.
If the last few weeks have taught us anything, it is that
the club’s boardroom executives control the head coach’s future, and they have
been consistently supportive of Frank since his appointment in June.
The hierarchy will soon face more pressure from fans than
they have at any point since Daniel Levy’s dismissal in September. That
was the Year Zero moment, the sudden rupture when the Lewis family took back
control of the club.
The old way of doing things, built around Levy, was out. In
came a new modern corporate structure. At the heart of it was CEO Vinai
Venkatesham, who had arrived earlier in the summer. There was a new
non-executive chairman, Peter Charrington, a private banker and a long-standing
Lewis family associate, who had joined the board in March.
After Levy’s departure, fans were curious to see how the
club would function in this new era. They wanted to know whether the Lewis
family shared their own ambitions for the club, and whether it would be any
better for Spurs than the last few years of Levy’s tenure. Five months on, the
mood does not seem any better than it was last year. And this time, there is no
Levy-shaped shield to protect the family from criticism.
On Sunday, there will be another ‘Change for Tottenham’
protest, including a planned walkout 15 minutes before the end of the game. The
numbers may not be as big as they were for the protest marches this time
last year, when Levy was still in situ, but some of the arguments that were
used to criticise Levy are already being used against the Lewis family. The
chants of “ENIC Out” do not distinguish between the two.
What many fans want to see is clear direction and
leadership, a feeling of things being firmly gripped and acted upon. The
challenge for the club’s decision-makers is that no matter how hard they are
all working in private, only a very limited part of what they do is visible to
the public. If they wanted to publicly prove to the fans that they are acting
decisively, changing the head coach or buying more players would be the most
obvious ways.
Ultimately, the future of the football club rests on that
relationship between the club’s management, led by Venkatesham, and the
majority shareholding Lewis family. My
only concern is that it is a bit likely van Wolferen’s account of
decision-making in Japan: despite appearances, no one is actually in charge.
Venkatesham and his team are responsible for the daily
running of the club. The Lewis family do not want to get involved in nuts and
bolts every day. They want to trust, empower and back the professional
management. But when it comes to major strategic decisions, the family will
naturally be involved.
Personally, I think that Spurs fans should show a bit more
patience, but then that is true of football fans generally. Sacking the manager gives a short term fix
and boost to morale, but it rarely solves
deeper structural problems.
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