For almost a quarter of a century, everything at Tottenham Hotspur revolved around Daniel Levy. He ran the club with total knowledge, total control, and his word was always final.
But when Levy was sacked on September 4, he wasn’t even allowed into the training centre to retrieve his possessions. Nor was his wife Tracey, who worked at the club until the day Levy was sacked. Their belongings were eventually returned by van.
A separation this sharp is standard practice in the corporate world. It would be the same at any blue-chip company. But it is still a remarkable moment in the world of Premier League football, an instant transformation of status for one of its best-known figures.
That glistening glass and metal training centre in Enfield, opened in 2012, was one of Levy’s biggest achievements at Spurs.
This was a facility worth boasting to the world about, far removed from the club’s rickety old home in Chigwell, Essex. This was where Levy would base himself, and where he would proudly take meetings. Until this month, that is, when the king found himself locked out of his own castle for good.
Of course, the central fact of the events of early September is that Levy was never quite as much the king of Tottenham Hotspur as he appeared to be. Even if he ran the club like he was an owner (he almost ran it like a founder), true power lay with the Lewis family. And they exercised that power in a brutal, ruthless way on September 4.
Levy is now left out in the cold, bruised, wounded, still with his minority shareholding in Spurs but with no executive voice.
Meanwhile, Tottenham — and by extension the Lewis family — have a hierarchy with a Levy-shaped hole in it that they need to fill.
When Peter Charrington chairs the first meeting of the post-Levy board on Friday, it will mark a historic break with the past 24 years.
Levy’s downfall was so sudden that even he had no idea on that Thursday morning that his tenure at the club was about to end.
It felt like just another week at the start of an international break and came a couple of days after the closing of the summer transfer window.
Tottenham had lost their home game against Bournemouth on the Saturday, but they paraded Netherlands international winger Xavi Simons on the pitch beforehand, his signing from RB Leipzig having been a significant personal triumph for Levy. The chairman had been as involved as ever in Spurs’ transfer business over the prior weeks and months. Losing out to neighbours and arch-rivals Arsenal for Crystal Palace’s England forward Eberechi Eze in late August was painful, but Levy was determined to finish the window strongly, and on its last day, they also signed France striker Randal Kolo Muani on loan from Paris Saint-Germain.
After a long summer, it was time for everyone at Spurs to take a breath.
But then Levy walked into a meeting with Charrington, who the Lewis family had appointed to the board six months before, on what should have been a quiet day.
Instead, one era of Tottenham ended and another began.
However, even if the timing was a shock — not least to Levy himself — this did not come entirely out of the blue either.
The Athletic reported on the night of Levy’s dismissal that the Lewis family had increased their scrutiny of club affairs over the course of 2025, trying to get to the bottom of why exactly Spurs were underperforming on the pitch. Even though last season ended in triumph with victory in the Europa League final, it was a miserable experience in the Premier League. Tottenham looked like a team getting further away from the best sides in the country, rather than closing the gap, as they finished 17th, above only the three relegated clubs. More than six years after the opening of their new stadium, this was not meant to happen.
So in March, the Lewises appointed Charrington, a veteran private banker and senior partner at their luxury resort brand Nexus, to the board. At the same time, they hired United States-based management consultancy firm Gibb River to go into Tottenham and speak to senior staff about what was going wrong. Why was this football club, with some of the best facilities in the world, no longer competing on the pitch?
This review led to staffing changes that were significant enough on their own terms, even before the departure of Levy. First was the announcement that Vinai Venkatesham would be arriving as chief executive in June, the first time in two decades-plus under the ownership of the Lewis family’s ENIC investment group that Spurs had someone in such a role. Then there was the departure of board member Donna Cullen, a long-standing Levy ally and one of the most influential figures behind the scenes at the club throughout his tenure.
The summer was busy enough anyway, just for football reasons. There was a change in the structure, with chief football officer Scott Munn leaving. There was a change of head coach, with Brentford boss Thomas Frank replacing Ange Postecoglou. There was a demanding transfer window, where Tottenham desperately needed to reinforce their first team. Only once that was done could they make the final and most important move of all.
There was another story in the background this year, aside from debates over whether or not Levy was running Spurs well.
This concerned the future ownership of the club.
It was no secret that during the final years of his chairmanship, Levy was pursuing the idea of selling a stake in Tottenham. The idea, in short, was that he would find a new investor who would buy a big chunk of shares — something along the lines of 10 per cent of the club for £400million. Levy was very open about this, saying in public in 2024 that the operation “requires a significant increase in its equity base”. In private, his pitch to potential investors was that he had built the platform for Spurs and now needed to raise substantial capital for the next phase of their growth.
Such a deal, had it happened, could even have altered the balance of power at the club. New money and a new backer would have given Levy what he was looking for.
Over the course of this year, though, a new theory started to emerge. That there might be a larger investment, not just for a minority stake, but for a new investor or consortium buying out the Lewis family’s majority shareholding. And that under this scenario, Levy might be asked continue to run Tottenham on behalf of a different backer, although well-placed sources have denied these talks ever took place.
Clearly, no such deal, whether for a smaller stake or a larger one, ever materialised. And the Lewis family have made clear their own position on this over the course of this month, that the club is not for sale, and the search for fresh external investment is over.
Now he is out, Levy is stuck in a rare position. His family still own 29.88 per cent of ENIC’s majority shareholding, and therefore roughly 26 per cent of the club. But now that he is off the board, his options are limited. Levy has no control, no decision-making power and no voice. If Levy wanted to attend a game at the stadium that he oversaw the construction, and watch the team he has supported since childhood, you may be more likely to see him in the stands than back in the executive box.
It is not only Levy who finds himself in a strange situation this autumn. Just as he has to get on with life without Tottenham, they have to get on with life without him.
Because it is difficult to overstate how powerful and dominant Levy was at the club who got rid of him three weeks ago. There was not a football executive in the Premier League quite like him. Not only for longevity, but also for authority. Levy’s word was gospel at Spurs. He oversaw every detail at the club, from the specific designs of their new stadium to the finer points of transfer negotiations.
Levy’s work ethic and attention to detail meant that he was the ultimate driver of standards across the club. Staff knew that whenever he walked into the restaurant at the training centre — even if he was wearing jeans and a T-shirt rather than a suit — it was time for them to switch on. They also knew that Levy was the ultimate arbiter if they had to come to him with a serious issue. For better or worse, he created a very particular, personal culture at Tottenham, one that is now being replaced with something else.
The challenge at Spurs in the past three weeks has been to find a new way of working, a new way of organising the club, adjusting to this huge change while also keeping the show on the road. The phrase that Venkatesham has used is “business as usual”, which sounds unlikely given the historic nature of the changes, but in a sense, he is right. The relentlessness of the football calendar effectively forces everyone to keep moving forward.
So life at Tottenham has continued; it has just looked very different.
On September 9, there was a long-planned meeting with the club’s Fan Advisory Board. The FAB and senior club figures get together quarterly at Lilywhite House, next to the stadium. Levy attended these sessions in the Septembers of 2023 and 2024, but this month’s edition came just five days after his sacking. It was Venkatesham who was there, alongside Matthew Collecott, the club’s long-standing operations and finance director, and one of the most important figures through the long Levy era. Charrington, Venkatesham said, hoped to attend the next round of FAB talks, which are likely to be in December.
This summer’s events have left Venkatesham as the most important individual in the running of Tottenham. For his first three months at the club, he was working alongside Levy, but since the events of September 4, he has had full control of the steering wheel. He told the FAB that a new Executive Leadership Team (ELT) has been set up, consisting of himself, Collecott and what will eventually be six other senior figures, including the newly appointed chief marketing and chief communications officers. This is the new model, the new corporate structure, with power less centralised at the top.
Venkatesham has also found himself thrust into a different role: the public face of the club. Ever since his arrival, it has been a priority for Spurs to communicate more openly with the public than they used to. After Levy’s sudden departure, fans were waiting for answers, and it was Venkatesham who spoke to them on behalf of the new hierarchy. On September 8, the club released a nine-minute video interview with him, recorded at the training ground, when he paid tribute to Levy and talked up the ambitions of the Lewis family.
When Tottenham played their first home game after Levy’s removal — against Villarreal in their Champions League opener on September 16 — the matchday programme carried ‘A Message from Vinai’ that ran along similar lines to that video. At a Premier League meeting a week later, it was Venkatesham, a veteran of these environments from his time at Arsenal, who represented Spurs.
The ultimate power, of course, still lies with the Lewises. That has been the unambiguous lesson of this historic month at Tottenham. While the family have never courted publicity, the removal of Levy means attention and scrutiny are unavoidable. They are the masters now. So they have a balance to strike, needing to be visible while making clear that the days of top-down control are over.
So Vivienne Lewis has been ever-present at the club’s games this month, usually sitting alongside or close to Venkatesham in the directors’ box.
For the 3-0 away win against local rivals West Ham United on September 13, the first game of the post-Levy era, she sat next to her son-in-law Nick Beucher, a co-CEO of Tavistock Group (the family’s investment company, which is the majority owner of ENIC and by extension Spurs) and a passionate Tottenham fan, who is primarily based in the U.S. state of Florida. When Spurs beat Villarreal 1-0 three days later, Vivienne was one place along from her brother Charles Lewis, who was alongside Venkatesham, with Charrington one seat further over. Vivienne was also at the game in Brighton last weekend and Wednesday’s Carabao Cup win at home to League One side Doncaster Rovers.
In time, she may even effectively replace Levy as the recognisable figure up in the posh seats that TV producers cut to whenever Tottenham score.
But the whole point of the new operation is that neither Vivienne Lewis nor Charrington, nor in fact anyone else, is a direct replacement for Levy. That old model of an all-powerful executive chairman is history. There has been a lot of talk this month about “empowering” the executive team — led by Venkatesham — and allowing them to get on with the job of running the club. The Lewis family do not want to get their hands dirty with the daily operations. Nor, so far, have they wanted to speak publicly and in detail about their plans for Spurs beyond the statement from the board, released late on September 7, clarifying that “Tottenham Hotspur is not for sale”.
The new era will continue today — September 26 — with the first official meeting of the post-Levy board, chaired by Charrington, and made up of Venkatesham, Collecott and independent director Jonathan Turner. Vivienne Lewis and Beucher will meet club staff at a drinks event afterwards. Vivienne Lewis and Beucher will both be in attendance for the Premier League home game against Wolverhampton Wanderers tomorrow.
Eventually, the fans will want to hear more specifics about the owners’ intentions. Right now, the focus for many is on the fact that Frank’s team has started the season well, losing just once in seven games since coming close to beating Champions League winners PSG in the UEFA Super Cup on August 13 before defeat on penalties. The summer signings are settling in, and the new-head-coach optimism has not yet dissipated.
But the club’s revised structure will inevitably face tests.
When the next transfer window opens in January, it will be the first in a generation that Tottenham will face without Levy there to negotiate with other clubs and agents. Sources within the football industry have wondered whether it will be Venkatesham or technical director Johan Lange tasked with speaking on Spurs’ behalf. Or whether Fabio Paratici, one of Levy’s trusted allies and the man who bought many of the current squad, will continue his work for the club. He attended the Villarreal match and looked as invested in Tottenham’s success as ever. But there is real confidence inside the club about Johan Lange’s record in the market, and the experience of Director of Football Operations Rebecca Caplehorn to handle the windows ahead.
This, in essence, is the challenge of the new era.
Removing Levy was just one act. Replacing everything that he did, and building what almost feels like a new club, while the football season continues, is another thing entirely.
Additional reporting: Jay Harris
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton/The Athletic)