In the weeks before Daniel Levy left Tottenham Hotspur in September, a Premier League counterpart noticed something that ensured the shock departure wasn’t actually much of a surprise at all. They’d registered how Vivienne Lewis – the daughter of former Spurs owner Joe Lewis, whose shares have since been put in a family trust – was suddenly visible at games, “smiling and laughing”. Such conviviality was all the more conspicuous since many rival executives say they hadn’t actually met her. The feeling was: “It didn’t look good for Daniel.”
Levy now isn’t seen at all, which will make a real change for the north London derby, right up to how former Arsenal CEO Vinai Venkatesham is now at Spurs. The refreshed hierarchy is set to be greeted by the increasingly prominent Josh Kroenke, son of Arsenal owner Stan.
It won’t just be a first meeting of new leadership teams across north London, as both clubs coincidentally made huge changes at the same time. It might also herald a more significant shift in English football.
The billionaires have already taken over. Now it’s the time for the billionaires’ children.
And while football clubs have obviously been passed down through wealthy families before – not least Arsenal’s Hill-Woods – the very ownership rules ensured it wasn’t the same. Even Manchester United are different, since Malcolm Glazer’s children made decisions at Manchester United from the start.
Spurs insiders would insist that the Lewises have been much more present for some time but less noticed, in the same way that Josh Kroenke had been attending men’s and women’s games without people scrutinising in the same way they do now. This is still the first time we’re witnessing a deeper handover in this US capitalist era.
There’s an obvious reference here that many in football are already joking about. This is Succession in the Premier League.
If so, such a shift adds yet another complexity to modern football, to go with geopolitics and competition law. We now have the classical psychodrama of how the scions of billionaires think.
Certain executives even believe that such shifts should be relevant to the new football regulator, and that the body should impose corporate governance standards in assessing all new appointments.
While all this might have a substantial effect on football, it also works the other way.
Numerous sources consulted for this piece previously felt the Lewis children had wanted to sell Spurs, although this has always been denied. Either way, The Independent has been told that “two very real” expressions of interest have been “completely rebuffed”. Qatar are said to have moved on.
The Lewis kids – led by Vivienne, son-in-law Nick Beucher and brother Charles – now very much have the taste for it. Premier League executives note that, generally, “it usually takes just three games”. The owner class see that one football decision gets more attention than any multi-billion pound deal.
And while many billionaires get into it for vanity or just to make more money, there can be another angle for the children. It can be a fast track to show their father – it is always the father – they can be successful.
“The Succession thing rings very true,” one boardroom figure says. “You note an increasing number of Kendall Roys.”
Two of the clubs’ most influential modern figures have found this to their cost, as vintage victims of boardroom intrigue.
Levy had been “everything” at Spurs and the Premier League’s longest serving executive, while former Arsenal executive vice-chairman Tim Lewis has been described as the most forthright, having returned the club to “seriousness,” as one source put it. He earned a public reputation for challenging Manchester City and state ownership, but was generally viewed as one of the voices most concerned with proper regulation.
The two still found that the gallons of water they carried for the owners weren’t as thick as blood, having been ousted as the children rose.
This has led to other jibes within Premier League boardrooms, reminiscent of Succession scripts. There have been references to “the luckiest sperm”, and calls to not “outshine the sun kings”.
The curiosity with Arsenal is a certain circularity. When Arsene Wenger left in 2018, sources say there were plans for Josh Kroenke to take more direct control. This was in an era of drift, though, where rivals mocked Arsenal for being soft and stale.
Worse was a perception of absenteeism from the ownership, as senior figures complained they couldn’t get to what Stan Kroenke was thinking.
That dramatically changed with the 2020 arrival of Lewis, a boyhood Arsenal fan and long-time Kroenke loyalist. He brought that link and started to restore a “bite”, from a vision.
With Mikel Arteta already in place, Lewis fully backed him, while devising a multi-year strategy on behalf of the Kroenkes to drive Arsenal back to the top.
That centred around his idea of a “Football Leadership Team” - essentially a football board involving weekly meetings between the chair, the manager, the sporting director and senior figures like the medical team. Numerous internal and external sources say it felt like the first time Arsenal had a clear direction in decades, amid a changed atmosphere of higher standards.
To go with the results, refuelled commercial revenue started to catch up with Liverpool.
Arteta’s relationship with Lewis was strong, briefly fortified by a growing partnership with new sporting director Andrea Berta. The latter’s summer recruitment also emphasised Lewis’s understanding of the owners. One senior insider says he was the only person capable of persuading Stan Kroenke on signings, going to the owner with thorough plans on why certain transfers should be made.
The signing of Eberechi Eze was symbolic in that regard, and not just because Arsenal gazumped Spurs.
The club had been conscious of the growing pressure to win now, which was why there was such concern when Kai Havertz got injured. Lewis convinced the ownership that they had to push the button on Eze.
It was also within this that there were the first signs of fracture. Ideas had previously been broached for Josh Kroenke to work at the club under Lewis, but he had commitments with the Denver Nuggets. Arsenal’s rise nevertheless coincided with greater prominence.
Having not been involved in the Berta appointment, Kroenke is said by sources to have pushed for Benjamin Sesko over Viktor Gyokeres. An appearance at the Professional Footballers’ Association awards was viewed as a clear sign he wanted to be “hands on”, which was followed by a personal push for Piero Hincapie.
Lewis’ abrupt departure in the weeks after that baffled many in the game. Even those he had more challenging relationships with feel the former lawyer deserved much more credit for where Arsenal were. Many attribute the club’s entire turnaround to him.
While Arsenal’s line was that the boardroom shift simply reflected a desire for “constant evolution”, it’s hard to see how there couldn’t have been tension. Numerous sources say “Josh clearly wanted to be the boss”, which was always going to clash with the fact Lewis was internally viewed as the actual boss.
That perhaps inevitably meant he was eventually going to run up against this father-son dynamic. His departure was announced on 19 September 2025. All of Arsenal, Spurs, Levy and Lewis have been contacted for this article but declined to comment.
The Eze signing nevertheless stands as a coup that could yet determine this derby, and prefaced Levy’s own exit. The setback was the latest in a series of transfer defeats for Spurs, as the ownership was monitoring how the club was moving. The club now wanted to go to the next level, but felt Levy was too used to a way that had become entrenched over 25 years.
It should still be acknowledged that this way has given the Lewis children a higher platform. Levy provokes a lot of opinion, but it’s difficult to dispute the manner in which he gradually took Spurs from a mid-table basketcase to Champions League finalists with one of the best stadiums in the world.
The flaws were in the micro rather than the macro, and the apparent reluctance to take pure football decisions that seized the moment. Those who negotiated with Levy similarly sensed he was too involved with transfers, and that recruitment would be overly guided by “zeitgeist trends”.
Beyond that, Levy is described as acting as if he were the owner, rather than just having a minority stake. His control was substantial. One source says Levy was totally “blindsided” by the September decision, because he didn’t conceive it was possible
Premier League rivals are now highly curious as to who will make the big decisions at Spurs. Insiders insist the Lewises will not micro-manage, and that the plan is to develop a multi-point team of expertise around Venkatesham.
People are still waiting to see, in the same way that all eyes at Arsenal are on the younger Kroenke and promoted chief executive Richard Garlick. They both have learning to do.
Others argue that the Kroenke father and son have actually been working in tandem as co-chairs for some time, and the main change is a board with a different expertise, for a different stage in the club’s development.
Josh Kroenke is also described as being more conscious than his father of how the ownership is perceived, while wanting to “do right by supporters”. That may reflect a different evolution in these dynamics, and how ownerships can go from seeing these “properties” as mere assets to the living, breathing clubs they actually are.
Others quip that Kroenke could do with taking more than 10 days to respond to some emails.
If these shifts might change the psychology of two of England’s grandest clubs, they are certainly changing the psychology of the Premier League. Levy brought a wealth of experience, while Lewis forced the competition to think about bigger issues. It is already seen as significant that Arsenal are understood to have wavered on the new concept of club expenditure “anchoring” - so there aren’t the same financial gaps - in a Premier League vote.
There is a view among long-term stakeholders that the further the competition gets from original founders, the less owners care about English football.
Is its future to just be dictated by states, private equity funds, billionaires and now their children? Premier League meetings are already said to be much more “corporate”, with Steve Parish one of the few distinctive voices. The very way of speaking is changing.
As regards those Succession quips, though, no one has yet said it to any of the new leadership’s faces.
The wonder is whether the response would still be smiling and laughing.
