When the Millennium Dome was built in London at the turn of the century, it was seen as a vast, futuristic, potentially iconic structure, albeit hugely expensive, and yet what lay inside wasn’t up to much. All style, no substance.
It’s hard not to think of the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium along similar lines, even more so now the Dome has become massive corporate concert venue, the O2, which is great for watching someone else put on a show.
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.
He has certainly added to the carnage in the last 44 days. Spurs needed simple, back-to-basics thinking and decisive action from someone who could command the respect of what looks like an unruly, undisciplined dressing room.
Instead, Tudor generally meddled, muddled and bulldozed his way through matches with unnecessarily complicated formations and players out of position, while initially berating them in public and derailing the career of a promising goalkeeper.
However, Spurs have lost 46 football matches in all competitions since the start of last season. Forty-six. By way of an inevitable comparison, their north London rivals Arsenal, whom Spurs finished above in the table four long years ago, have lost 13 games over the same period.
The fact that Tudor was appointed in the first place on February 14 reflects far worse on Spurs’ decision-makers than his exit on March 29.
Spurs are just not a serious 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 League.
It’s just a shame that their football team — you know, the reason for their entire existence — is a shambles.
Spurs are serving microwave dinners at The Ritz. Great stadium, dreadful team, and fans have to pay about £1,000 for a season ticket.
Two weeks ago, the club’s chief revenue officer, Ryan Norys, was due to appear in Texas to tell an assembled crowd about Spurs being a “cultural powerhouse” and how they are redefining what a modern football club can be. The talk seemingly did not go ahead — one of the few good decisions the club appear to have made in recent months — but the jokes had already written themselves.
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.
Instead, Tudor’s appointment was a byproduct of what happens when there is a lack of football experience at management level and no plan to replace Thomas Frank, despite the Dane failing for months. Tudor’s ties to former managing director Fabio Paratici, who left the club in January, suggest the Italian’s opinion remained influential and speaks damningly of a club with no idea what else to do.
No wonder Frank failed. At Brentford, he worked in almost exactly the opposite conditions: small ground, small wage bill, but more importantly, a club with laser-sharp focus on recruitment amid joined-up thinking behind the scenes with staff who had been there for years.
Brentford are so well run that you can legitimately ask how good their head coach actually needs to be. At Spurs, the question is: can any head coach thrive at all when the club appears so disjointed?
Recruitment has been a problem for some time, with or without Levy.
Looking at the 10 record signings in the club’s history is to view a list of mostly underachievers, none of whom have become great Spurs players, or been sold on for a profit. Nor are any of them likely to, except perhaps Micky van de Ven (a hefty sale, that is).
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.
Those who are at the club often seem either disinterested or go into their shells, contributing to an abominable home record at a stadium where opposing teams and fans usually have a great day out. The facilities are glorious, but the atmosphere isn’t intimidating, and the players lack character. An ideal away day, as fans of Crystal Palace and Nottingham Forest can tell you, having come away from North London with 3-1 and 3-0 wins respectively, despite those matches being dubbed as two of the biggest in the club’s modern history. Before them, Bournemouth, Newcastle and West Ham had all tasted victory at the stadium this season.
A recent meeting of the club’s Fan Advisory Board was attended by chief executive Vinai Venkatesham (who joined from Arsenal last year), who explained that a comprehensive review since June last year had identified areas of improvement.
Venkatesham said areas like the stadium, training ground, commercial activities, and other stadium operations were going really well. Nice one.
But it was also reported that key improvement areas include: insufficient focus on football success, a lack of expertise in key areas, a recruitment and wage policy that was holding the club back, and a squad that required more quality, experience and leadership.
Is that all? Oh, and their player sales weren’t good enough, the women’s team hadn’t been enough of a priority, the “internal culture” needed addressing, and there was a “growing disconnect” between the club and its supporters.
Maybe Norys is right, Spurs are redefining what a modern football club can be, what with their incredibly expensive season tickets which have priced out a lot of ‘legacy’ fans, their obsession with brand Tottenham Hotspur (but never brand Tottenham, remember), and their immediate sacking of a manager who had ended the club’s inexorably long wait for a trophy.
Tudor certainly had to go, but this is about so much more than a man whose disastrous reign will be remembered in the same bracket as the likes of Frank de Boer at Crystal Palace, Les Reed at Charlton Athletic, Terry Connor at Wolverhampton Wanderers or Alan Shearer at Newcastle.
Relegation is almost unthinkable and would be a disaster in football terms, and certainly financially. No one could say they don’t deserve it.
They may yet hire a firefighter who keeps them up, but whether they avoid relegation or not, Spurs are a football club that needs saving.