The Tottenham CEO has taken part in another interview after the club's horrendous season and we've taken a deeper look in it
There's been a rush this week in members of the Tottenham Hotspur hierarchy looking to explain the club's dreadful season and promise a brighter future.
First up was non-executive chairman Peter Charrington with an open letter to the fans, then came a statement from the owners, the Lewis family, before two interviews with CEO Vinai Venkatesham, one with the BBC and the other with Spurs, as well as a club interview with Roberto De Zerbi.
Venkatesham's second interview might have gone unnoticed by many Tottenham supporters because it was not promoted by the club on any of its social media channels. We published a full transcript of it which fans can read by heading right here and below we've analysed the interview and the answers from the CEO..
Communication but buried
Although it hasn't felt particularly coordinated, we've can't really complain about suddenly having so much communication from those at the top of the north London club after almost a quarter of a century of barely hearing a peep out of the hierarchy when it came to the decisions made.
Daniel Levy and his board never seemed particularly fussed about discussing how and why they did what they did with the fanbase. The biannual written addresses, in the financial results and the end of season 'chairman's message', rarely if ever accepted any accountability for mistakes made.
So to suddenly have a flood of communication has to be a good thing, although it's odd that both Venkatesham's club interview and the Lewis family letter to the fans were not promoted across Spurs' social media channels. The supporters would not have even known they were there unless they happened to be browsing down the homepage of the club website or told by the media.
Perhaps it was due to the expected response from the fanbase after the replies to Charrington's letter but, especially after a near disastrous season like this, the supporters deserve to have their say about their club.
Beaten down Venkatesham
The immediate thing to notice about Venkatesham in the video interview is that he looks exactly as you would expect a man who has had a bruising first season at the helm to look. This was not the job he thought he was signing up for before he walked through the doors and, in keeping with the situation, this version of the CEO is far removed from the bubbly, excited chap talking about wine with Levy last year.
Now he is rightly using words like "embarrassing" and "unacceptable" while understanding how tough it has been for the supporters to watch and process.
Venkatesham left Arsenal as a popular figure among club staff and fans but his experience at Spurs has turned sour this season with the chaos that has spilled into his watch. He has faced criticism on social media and no doubt in person as well at games, with that background with the Gunners probably not helping his cause.
However, that background will have given him an insight, along with the increasing numbers of heads of department brought across from the City Football Group, into how a top club should be structured and run and hopefully the changes made behind the scenes will start bearing fruit and create something better in N17.
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Levy finger pointing
The consistent theme of the many messages from the hierarchy has been 'it was Levy's fault'. His name has not been mentioned and in Venkatesham's club interview he even goes as far as saying "none of this is meant to be a criticism, by the way, of anyone or anything".
But it is, because everything has been a criticism of what came before and all of that, for 24 years, was guided by the micro-managing hand of one man - Levy. So if the past is being said to be bad, he signed off on it.
"I need to say it as I saw it," said Venkatesham. "I think it's fair to say that the club was in a much worse state when you're able to look at it from the inside than I thought when I looked at it from the outside. So it was going to be a much bigger challenge than I thought it would be."
He added: "On the football side, a big gap between where we were and where we should be, and what has happened in football over the last five years is there's been an unbelievable acceleration of quality across all Premier League clubs and football operations, big, small or medium and Tottenham has been left behind in far too many of those areas.
"So we have been doing a really, really big reset of the club from September to fix that, because this is not going to be fixed by a tweak here, a player here, a member of staff here, an investment here. It needs a fundamental rebaselining, a complete reset, which is going to take time to deliver.
"These challenges, the reason why we're in this situation, have developed over many years and I wish I could just click my fingers in September and go from where we were to where we want to be. But it's just not realistic."
September is of course pertinent because it's when Levy left the club and Venkatesham took full control. There's no doubt that major elements of what happened under the former chairman's watch and what was allowed to stagnate has snowballed into the mess the club has become but he's not the only one at fault.
Huge January swerve
The questions were good in this interview with the Spurs CEO, but the answers weren't always the ones that matched them.
For example after a long but strong question about the January transfer window and that near disastrous decision not to buy any attacking players in the winter after selling the previous season's top scorer while more and more of the squad were getting injured, Venkatesham pulled off a shimmy, swerve and a feint that David Ginola would have been proud of in his prime.
The answer was long but incredibly general and never actually admitted any fault in the decision-making during that weak window or really even spoke much about it at all. It was as close as possible to how you would imagine a politician would answer the question, with lots of talk around the subject but never actually answering its core.
It cannot be overstated just how pivotal that transfer window, with no attacking players bought as they were dropping like flies, could have been. One more West Ham win would have ensured it was the decision that got Tottenham relegated.
Missing accountability
That's perhaps the theme of this interview. There's plenty of talk about what needs to be done but not once do the words "sorry" or "apologise" appear at any point in relation to the fans who have paid huge sums once again this season to watch an absolute chaotic mess of a football club.
Perhaps there's been PR advice not to apologise or admit any fault, and instead point to the past, but that's simply treating the fans like they're daft and haven't seen four head coaches in charge over the past year, a failure of a transfer window at the first time of asking under the new regime and almost the club's first relegation in half a century.
It was only in Venkatesham's BBC interview that Thomas Frank and Igor Tudor were asked about and he had to touch upon them, two men that he and Johan Lange heavily put their faith in and played a major part in selecting. The CEO went as far in that interview as saying Tudor was a mistake without actually saying the word but never admitted that Frank was clearly the wrong man for the club.
That is despite their exhaustive selection process clearly being utterly flawed in landing upon a man who, while a good coach, did not play the football they claimed he would and had no understanding of how to communicate with the fans of a bigger, more expectant club.
In the club interview it's like those appointments never happened and instead what a wonderful decision it was to appoint Roberto De Zerbi.
All it would have taken was an acknowledgement that "we messed up as well but we've learned a lot from this season and we will be better going forward for you".
Transfer vow and positives
It's important to make it clear that there were positives in this interview and plenty of them in respect to what comes next and how much within the club has been identified as needing improving.
That includes improving the wage structure, which Venkatesham said "hasn't been fit for purpose" and spending transfer money, with backing from the Lewis family, to bring in the best players possible within the financial fair play regulations. There's also fixing the training ground to become one of the best in the world for footballers rather than hotel guests.
There was also talk of investment in the academy and women's team as well as the medical and performance departments and world-leading people to come in at all levels.
"We will fix this, and that is the absolute focus of everybody here. Not just me, the owners, the board, everybody who works at this club is completely focused on getting the club back to where, not just where it should be, where it absolutely has to be," said Venkatesham.
The Tottenham fans are watching. They've been listening for a quarter of a century to words with no real action behind. That must change.