Six months ago, no Tottenham Hotspur fan, unless they had a particular interest in wealth management, would be able to tell you who Peter Charrington was.
But after a dramatic week, Charrington is the name on everyone’s lips. On Thursday afternoon, he stepped into the role of non-executive chairman. It was the start of a new era at Spurs.
Everyone knows why Thursday was so significant. It marked the end of Daniel Levy’s time at Tottenham, after more than 24 years steering the ship in his own particular way. Levy was such a dominant figure at Spurs that it will take everyone some time to get used to his absence. When Spurs play at West Ham United next weekend (September 13), it will be surreal not to see him in the directors’ box watching on. No one can say with certainty how this will impact the atmosphere when Spurs host Villarreal in the Champions League a few days later.
It is safe to assume that Charrington will be there, likely sitting close to chief executive Vinai Venkatesham. It is only six months since Charrington joined Spurs as a non-executive director, a role he took up on March 12, but he finds himself having been at the club longer than Venkatesham, longer than head coach Thomas Frank and longer than women’s team head coach Martin Ho, all of whom began their new roles during the off-season. This is a period of profound adjustment for everyone at the club, to put it mildly.
Charrington himself has been learning the ropes of the football industry over the last six months, especially since Venkatesham arrived. Charrington’s background is not in sport but in private banking. He spent 26 years at Citibank and made his name at Citi Private Bank, which manages the money of high-net-worth individuals. He ran its operations in the UK and North America before becoming Citi Private Bank’s global head from 2014 to 2020. He won ‘Best Leader in Private Banking’ at the 2019 Global Private Banking Awards.
It was not just Charrington’s professional expertise that led him to Spurs, but also his relationship with the Lewis family. Charrington is a long-standing confidante and adviser to Tottenham’s majority shareholders. And after he left Citi in 2020, his next move was directly into the Lewis family operation. In 2022, Charrington became a senior partner at Nexus Luxury Collection, the luxury resort and hospitality company the Lewis family co-founded with Tiger Woods and Ernie Els. This meant having a base in the Bahamas, where the Lewis family have their Albany resort.
Beyond Nexus, Charrington is also a senior adviser to One Equity Partners, a New York-based private equity firm, as well as a non-executive board member of Swiss wealth management technology firm Avaloq, and a senior adviser to technology consulting firm UST Global.
The real point here is about more than just individuals. It is about more than just Charrington’s CV in the world of banking and wealth management. It is also about more than just Levy, as significant as he is in the history of this football club. The real point is about structure and governance, and the difference between a non-executive chairman and an executive one.
For the last 24 years, Tottenham Hotspur was structured in a very particular way. Levy was not a traditional chairman, but one who ran the whole club from the top down, along with his most trusted allies. He was across everything, a slave to the details, and not afraid to get his hands dirty with the finer points of negotiation, especially on transfers. He truly put the ‘executive’ in ‘executive chairman’. Levy was executing the work of the business every day for 24 years.
Over time, this arrangement made Tottenham stand out from their rivals, especially as other Premier League clubs moved to a more classic corporate structure — where the non-executive chairman is the backstop, someone who oversees the actions of the CEO, makes sure that the executives are doing their jobs, but does not get their hands dirty with the day-to-day running of the club.
This more traditional system is where Tottenham have ended up. It is why Charrington’s role is so different from Levy’s. In football terms, you could not call it a ‘like-for-like replacement’. Charrington will not be running the finer points of the club in the way that Levy used to.
Under such a structure, the most important person in daily operations is not the chairman, but the CEO. Venkatesham is in charge of running the club. He will become responsible for driving the strategy and making the decisions every day. Since soon after his arrival in June, senior figures, including Frank and technical director Johan Lange, have reported to Venkatesham, who, up until Thursday, reported into Levy.
In practice, Levy was still involved in the club’s operations, as the transfer window showed. Levy and Venkatesham made a video together, released on June 17. “I’ll be taking more of the lead day-to-day on operational matters on the pitch and off the pitch, but we’ll be working on everything together,” Venkatesham said. “And certainly there won’t be any decisions of any significance that happen at the club that we’re not completely joined at the hip on.”
That brief three-month double act between an executive chairman and a CEO is now over. Venkatesham is in charge of execution, and more appointments are planned for heads of department who will report to him. It is not a new responsibility for him, having been CEO of Arsenal from 2020 to 2024. His relationship with Charrington, the man he is accountable to, will be the single most important relationship in this restructured boardroom.
That is why perhaps the most important part of Charrington’s brief statement on Thursday was his reference to “empowering our talented people across the club, led by Vinai and his executive team”. The idea for this new era is not for the Lewis family to manage the details of how the club is run every day, but to have the right experts in place, and back those executives to run it well for them.
(Top photo:YouTube/@ustglobalweb)