I have a number of friends who are Spurs fans and I have been telling them for some time, think about structure not agency. Modern football is obsessed with the manager or coach as if he actually controls the players on the pitch.
Tottenham Hotspur have a splendid stadium (a relative who
was a contractor is full of praise) but they seem to have forgotten that this
is a means to the key objective of success on the pitch.
Spurs, as one senior figure recently publicly admitted, are
a football club who haven’t focused enough on the football. They’re a name, a
brand, a venue, an events company. But not primarily a football team.
It’s not Igor Tudor’s fault. You don’t blame the erroneously
hired admin manager when the FTSE 100 company goes bankrupt.
Spurs are just not a serious enough football club. Well,
they’re a serious football club when it comes to aesthetics. Their stunning
stadium is one of the finest in Europe, their state-of-the-art training ground
is the same, they host NFL matches and some of the world’s most famous musicians
and performers, boxing title bouts, rugby matches and so on. The club makes a
lot of money from all this; in fact, only eight football clubs in the world
generate higher revenues than Spurs, according to the Deloitte Money Leage.
It’s just a shame that their football team — you know, the
reason for their entire existence — falls well short of what might reasonably
be expected.
Daniel Levy created this culture, with too much focus on
finances and furniture rather than football, but you can argue this current
guise of Spurs is worse off without him. This still feels like Levy’s club in
spirit, but without his experience and leadership. There were many Spurs
supporters who thought their club would be better off without Levy… they may be
proved right, but just not yet.
This is Levy Lite and until a new structure, new owners and
new processes appear, Spurs will continue to drift and make crazy decisions
like handing Tudor the responsibility of keeping them in the Premier League.
For all Levy’s faults, he surely wouldn’t have hired the Croatian.
It is not easy being Spurs. They are stuck below the
country’s biggest clubs such as Liverpool, Manchester United and Arsenal, who
can attract the biggest names in the sport, but “too big” to go down the
Brighton/Brentford route of innovative recruitment because the club wants
success in a hurry.
Instead, they so often have to settle for second or third
choices after missing out on targets (Eberechi Eze, Antoine Semenyo and Morgan
Gibbs-White in the past year alone) and buy players who seem to think they can
use them as a stepping stone to bigger things — follow in the footsteps of
Gareth Bale, Luka Modric and Harry Kane and join a Champions League-chasing
side. Except the players Spurs buy are rarely good enough to do that.
Relegation is almost unthinkable and would be a disaster in
football terms, and certainly financially.
Although it looks bleak, survival is still possible: there is enough
quality in the team if they can find their mojo.
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