Daniel Levy cast a long shadow at Tottenham and if ENIC want a full cultural reset, it will take some time before the former chairman’s influence fades away for good.
For one, Levy is still a shareholder. He owns just shy of 30 per cent of ENIC, who in turn own somewhere in the region of 85 per cent of Tottenham. The remaining equity is held by private investors who bought shares on the London Stock Exchange when the club was still a listed company.
Incidentally, some of those shareholders may have had their stakes in the club as far back as 1983. If ever there came a time when they were able to cash in as part of a full takeover, the markup would be off the charts. Most analysts peg Spurs’ enterprise value at around £3-4bn.
What’s more, Levy’s son – Josh Levy – remains the co-CEO of Tavistock, the Bahamas-based entity which houses Joe Lewis’s various investments, ultimately including the North London club itself through ENIC.
The head of the Levy family spent nearly a quarter of a century at Spurs and, while the new-look regime’s public and private PR push has evangelised about a ‘clean break’, the years he clocked up in N17 continue to define the club as an institution.
However, there have already been wholesale personnel changes and, although the £100m ENIC injected into the club earlier this month has been ringfenced for running costs rather than a glitzy January transfer window, that too was clearly also an attempt to put some meat on the bones of their new strategy.
Interestingly, the £90m the owners added to the club’s debt via a short-term, high-interest loan secured against future Premier League TV revenue from Australian investment Macquarie in September did not get nearly the same fanfare.
News of the £90m emerged barely a week after Levy had left the club. A few months earlier, Levy’s trusted consigliere Donna-Maria Cullen, who had been with the club for 19-and-a-half years, also stepped down.
The move to appoint former Arsenal powerbroker Vinai Venkatesham in April was seen by some as a prelude to the post-levy era, though seemingly not by Venkatesham himself. Sources have told TBR Football that the executive was as surprised as anyone to learn that Levy had been ousted.
Bahamas-based Peter Charrington is now, ostensibly, where the buck stops at Spurs. The non-executive chairman has now been joined by Eric Hinson, an American national with decades of experience in the aviation and aerospace sectors.
Even more recently, it has been confirmed that Spurs’ head of football administration Rebecca Caplehorn has now also left the club, 10 years after joining the club from Queens Park Rangers.
While not a high-profile figure outside the industry, she left deep footprints at Premier League shareholder and European Club Association (now rebranded as European Football Clubs) meetings, where the very biggest decisions in football finance are made.
The new-look Spurs board
That meant she was effectively Spurs’ voice when it came to the defining issue of the current era: PSR.
Profit and Sustainability Rules and UEFA’s equivalent system at European level shape the game’s economy and, more than data analytics or club history, dictate who has the best chances of winning on the pitch.
Having spent almost all of the last 25 years surviving – or, as some Spurs fans might say, subsisting – on their own revenues, Tottenham have never had any anxieties about PSR. That is not to say that they are laissez-faire, though.
On 21 November, Premier League shareholders’ representatives will meet for the second quarterly meeting of the year. The main point of order will be PSR, with clubs set to vote on the possible introduction of new anchoring and squad cost control rules.
These rules, which if implemented will likely run in tandem with the existing PSR system, will…
Anchoring: Limit clubs to spending five times what the bottom-placed club earns in central Premier League distributions on first-team wages, transfer amortisation and agents’ fees
Squad cost control: Cap spending on first-team wages, transfer amortisation and agents’ fees at 85 per cent of total turnover plus profit on player sales
Following Caplehorn’s departure, it is not clear who will represent Spurs at the summit.
However, University of Liverpool football finance lecturer and Price of Football author Kieran Maguire is confident that old habits will die hard and Tottenham’s position on PSR will not have changed.
“Spurs have historically been quite traditional in their approach to PSR,” he said in exclusive conversation with TBR Football.
“They are one of the clubs who will be least impacted by stricter financial controls and that will influence how they vote on PSR.
“Spurs are very much aware of the new nouvaue riche. Chelsea and Man City are what Spurs would consider new-money clubs, but in Newcastle, Aston Villa, maybe Nottingham Forest and Everton, there are clubs that want to address the glass ceiling and the gap between themselves and the so-called ‘Big Six’.
“You have to invest to smash that glass ceiling, so PSR is a barrier. Stricter controls would allow Spurs to maintain their privileged position.”