These are not easy times at Tottenham Hotspur.
The real pressure arising from the club’s situation will not just be on interim head coach Igor Tudor, but on the people that run the club and ultimately on the majority-shareholding Lewis family. It is almost six months since the Lewis family sacked Daniel Levy, and in doing so, removed the man who effectively shielded them from scrutiny for so long.
Spurs host Arsenal on Sunday, the first of Tudor’s 12 Premier League games in charge. He only took his first training session on Monday, and must try to revive a team laid low by miserable league form and an unforgiving injury crisis.
This is a new situation for the Lewis family. And if a new head coach cannot turn around results, the fans’ ire will turn again to the owners.
Vivienne Lewis, her brother Charles Lewis and her son-in-law Nick Beucher have often been seen at Spurs games this season. But despite overseeing the club for much of the campaign, no member of the Lewis family has yet taken the Premier League’s test to qualify as a club director.
Who at Tottenham has taken the Premier League’s Owners’ and Directors’ Test?
The Premier League publishes the names of everyone who has taken the owners and directors’ test (OADT), listing them as either ‘Statutory directors’ or ‘Other Directors’ of their respective clubs.
The Tottenham Hotspur entry lists five people as ‘Statutory directors’: Peter Charrington (non-executive chairman), Matthew Collecott (chief operating and finance officer), Eric Hinson (non-executive director), Jonathan Turner (lead independent director) and Vinai Venkatesham (chief executive officer). Between them, those five men make up the board of Tottenham Hotspur Limited, the club’s holding company.
But of the new generation of the Lewis family who have been seen at games this season — Vivienne Lewis, Charles Lewis and Nick Beucher — especially since the dismissal of Daniel Levy as executive chairman last September, none of them is listed.
None of them, sources familiar with the situation told The Athletic, have taken the OADT, nor are they in the process of taking it.
Does this mean that the Lewis family is not involved?
Not quite. Under the club’s new governance model, the Lewis family, as majority shareholders, wants to trust the management to run the club. But the family will naturally be consulted by management — mainly Venkatesham, who has overall responsibility for on- and off-field decisions — on major strategic calls.
It is no secret that some members of the Lewis family have been more present at Tottenham in recent months.
In an interview with the Spurs website last September, four days after Levy’s removal, Venkatesham said that Vivienne Lewis was “a very regular attendee at Tottenham Hotspur games and also frequently joins us on pre-season tours”. And that “going forward, around the club you’ll be seeing a bit more of her brother Charlie and also her son-in-law Nick, and the thing that ties them all together is their passion for Tottenham Hotspur and their ambition for the club moving forward”.
On September 26, the Lewis family members attended a drinks event with staff to get to know them.
During the November international break, in another attempt to build relationships between owners and management, there was a summit in the Bahamas. Venkatesham, Lange and Fabio Paratici, before he left for Fiorentina, flew out for a series of meetings about club strategy going forward. There was even a social event on Joe Lewis’ famous yacht. Paratici had advised replacing Thomas Frank as head coach as early as November, but the hierarchy wanted to keep him at the time.
Frank, dismissed as head coach last week, also spoke publicly about his relationship with members of the Lewis family.
Last month, the Dane revealed in a press conference that he had lunch with Beucher, Venkatesham and Lange at the training ground on January 19, and then again with Beucher and Lange on January 22.
“Nick was here this week,” Frank said on January 22. “That was planned five weeks ago, so that’s normal if he’s over and we have lunch one or two days at the training ground.”
Frank talked up the Lewis family’s commitment to the club. “The most visible ones are Vivienne, Nick, and then Peter Charrington,” he added. “All three are very determined, focused on doing everything they can so that this club has success. They’re very, very committed.
“They want to do everything they can to get us to where we all want to be.”
Why haven’t any Lewises taken the test?
The majority shareholding is owned by “a discretionary trust of which certain members of Mr J(oe) Lewis’s family are potential beneficiaries”, according to the Tottenham website. Charrington, the chairman, has passed the OADT — he represents the Lewis family trust on the board.
The other members of the family not taking the OADT largely comes down to a matter of choice. Ultimately, the Lewis family’s view is that they do not want to be involved in the day-to-day running of the club, and they never have been.
For more than 20 years, they entrusted the daily running to Levy, right up until his dismissal as chairman last September. Since then, they have been more visible, but even with a new governance structure in place, the family still does not want to run the club day to day. This model — trusting the experts to run their businesses — is how the Lewis family looks to conduct its operations in other sectors.
Management on the ground has been entrusted with the daily execution of decisions. CEO Venkatesham, who arrived at Tottenham last summer, before Levy’s dismissal, is the most important person in how the club is run.
This season, he has built up an executive leadership team, with appointments in key roles, effectively replacing many of the functions previously filled by Levy and others who used to run the club. Venkatesham has also effectively become the club’s voice, speaking publicly about the Lewis family’s plans and strategies, something the family has not done.
Venkatesham and the management make recommendations to the board, as was the case on February 11, when Frank was dismissed as head coach.
So, how much does all this matter?
The Lewis family are clearly still involved in regular discussions about what goes on at Spurs, as you would expect. There is nothing untoward about dialogue with the ownership.
But the short answer is that this matters only if the family, rather than the club’s management, were making all the decisions. Sources close to the Lewis family have been clear that it is the management who run the club.
The situation at Spurs, though, is certainly uncommon within the Premier League. If you read through the Premier League’s ‘Public Register of Club Directors’, you will see that for almost every other club, the owners are also directors and generally sit on the club’s board. And if they are listed by the Premier League, it means that they have passed the OADT.
Now, not every one of these situations is the same. Newcastle United, for example, are 85 per cent owned by the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund. Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the club chairman, is the governor of PIF, but he is not its owner. Some clubs — such as Chelsea, Crystal Palace, and West Ham United — have a diverse owner group. The Manchester United arrangement, where Sir Jim Ratcliffe effectively runs the club as a minority shareholder, is unique.
But it is nevertheless generally the case that the owners of the other 19 Premier League clubs have taken the OADT, and they often also sit on the club’s board.
What about the new regulator?
The independent football regulator (IFR) had its powers switched on in December, revamping the way clubs’ owners, directors and senior executives are monitored, known as the ODSE regime. This has no connection with the Premier League’s own OADT process, and will run separately and in parallel.
This week, the IFR will write to all of the 116 clubs within its scope, from the Premier League down to the National League. These letters will demand that clubs declare who their key decision-makers are so that the IFR can establish a baseline for regulation. The IFR will not automatically test those people declared by the clubs, as its test will only be used under specific circumstances. These are request for information (RFI) letters, which means that all clubs written to must respond because of the regulator’s powers granted by the Football Governance Act. The clubs will need to provide personnel statements to the IFR when applying for their provisional licences.
From May, the IFR will also have the power to test new owners, or anyone taking up a role that means they fall under the ODSE regime.
After the IFR has all the relevant information back from clubs on personnel, that will eventually be published online, although that may not be until late next year.