The Tottenham Hotspur CEO has spoken in another interview which the club has decided not to promote on their social media channels
Tottenham CEO Vinai Venkatesham admits this season was "embarrassing" and "unacceptable" in an in-house interview that has not been promoted by the club.
Venkatesham's first season at the helm of the north London outfit after stepping in following Daniel Levy's departure after 24 years has been a bruising one. Spurs finished 17th again in the Premier League table and only escaped relegation by two points and a final day victory against Everton in front of a packing and noisy Tottenham Hotspur Stadium which instead sent West Ham down into the Championship.
In the days since there have been open letters and interviews galore with those involved in the hierarchy. While the letter to the fans from non-executive chairman Peter Charrington and Roberto De Zerbi's club interview were promoted across Tottenham's X and Facebook channels, a letter from the owners, the Lewis family, and a wide-ranging 15 minute interview with Venkatesham, following his first interview with the BBC, was not, as of yet, pushed out to the fans and instead simply sit on the club's website.
There is plenty to digest in Venkatesham's interview so here is the full transcript as the CEO looked to explain the mess of this season, how things went wrong and what will be done to fix it.
We sit here at the end of what has been probably the worst season that our club has had in the Premier League era. It's really important, I think, to address as many of the different issues that fans would have had and experienced this season. So to start with, can you outline why we found ourselves in this position? And then further from that, why is this group of individuals that are now responsible for steering our club in the right direction, the correct group of people to lead the club forward?
Well, I think to start with, I just wanted to just be obviously completely clear that the season has been completely unacceptable. The men's first team should never, ever be involved in a relegation battle. It is just so far beneath the standards that this football club has. And I know for our supporters, it has been impossibly difficult. It has been exhausting. It has been painful. It's just been embarrassing.
It's just not where this club can ever, ever be again. So I just wanted to say thank you, first of all, for our supporters for sticking with the team all the way through to the end of the season. It has been critically important, but home and away, the team have really felt that support and felt it really genuinely.
I know the club has grown really significantly over the last decade, but I need to say it as I saw it. 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.
None of this is meant to be a criticism, by the way, of anyone or anything. I want to be clear on that. Some areas of strength on the commercial side, the stadium operations, very important because they drive the revenue to invest in the team, and in today's world of football, importantly, the financial fair play headroom.
But 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.
It's going to take some time to get back to where we need to be. We are in the process of delivering this reset, and we need to complete this reset to get the club to where it wants to be. It might not be the answer that everybody wants. It might be that everybody wants and feels that we should have to fix all of this straight away, but it's just not the reality of the situation.
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Straight away, the question that comes to mind is, why hasn't football been at the centre of everything? Why hasn't football come first as the first priority?
In all the big decisions that the club has made, I don't think it ruthlessly prioritised is this decision going to be a decision that's going to help us get more points on the pitch, which is going to help us be successful? And quite a lot of the challenges and quite a lot of things we're trying to fix actually are just by, if you are absolutely focused on, laser-focused on, is this going to help us win football matches? It's a great lens to make your decisions, because you then start making different decisions.
You then start investing in different areas. You then start doing different things and that's a lot of what we're doing now.
We opted not to strengthen in January beyond a couple of signings, particularly in an area of the field in attack, where we had a number of long-term absentees. And there was the hope that the players that were injured would return. In actual fact, we ended up losing players to further long-term injury. What was the kind of failsafe rationale there in January and again, is there an acceptance there that that was the wrong strategy to not go out and ensure that there was more support for our playing staff, particularly in the forward areas of the team?
If I look at the squad, I absolutely accept that the squad has not got the right blend of youth, experience, leadership characteristics and robustness. And you need to get that balance right if you're going to have a squad that can compete for a season in multiple competitions, and the club hasn't got that right mix at the moment. And that is what we need to do, and that's what we need to strengthen in transfer windows.
And predominantly, your opportunity to do that is in summer transfer windows. That is the reality. So absolutely accept that we don't have the mix correct in our squad today, and we need to look across those four lenses and more to get the mix right.
We also, if we want to get the right level of player in our squad, need to look at our wage structure, which hasn't been fit for purpose in terms of trying to achieve what we want to achieve. And we also need to have a different approach around how we do player transactions to make sure that we can land the players that we want to land as efficiently as possible in a very competitive, in a very difficult market, and also be able to sell the players at the right time that we don't think have long-term futures at the club.
To that end then, will we be looking to help Roberto this summer to ensure that he has the tools at his disposal in order to achieve the aims that he and the club has?
Yes, absolutely. So the summer transfer windows are the opportunities to strengthen the squad and I'm sitting here saying we don't have the right balance in that squad, so we need to act in the summer transfer window and summer transfer windows going forward to get the balance right.
People are aware of the fact that January is harder to do business in, but what is our model and what is our strategy to try and bring the best talent to Tottenham Hotspur?
So we have a plan around what are the positions that we want to strengthen in the next few windows and what are the characteristics of the players that we will want in those positions and those players are continually tracked. That is, of course, all driven by our technical team in conjunction with the head coach.
So the technical people make technical decisions. You will never get somebody that is non-technical making a technical opinion on we should strengthen this position or we should sell this player or we should buy this player. So there's always a technical plan. Then you overlay that technical plan with what's the financial reality of what we're able to do, both in terms of a cash perspective.
And the Lewis family have been very, very clear, they will support the club from a cash perspective to get the squad to where it needs to be, but also, how does that work against the financial regulations and what you are able to do by the rules.
I know there are big plans for the next season and beyond in terms of our medical department. We suffered a lot of injuries last season and a lot of injuries this season. Is there a reason for that and how do we go about ensuring we are not a side facing a situation where we have the most injuries in the Premier League?
There's, of course, reasons for it. There are lots of things that contribute to the injury burden that we have. There are predominantly two major things that we are focused on.
One is putting together a world-class team of individuals in the performance team, so we have the best talent and the best people and the best expertise to work with and manage our players, structured and organised in the right way to be effective. So that's one piece.
And the second piece is going back to what I was saying earlier about making sure that performance is used as the lens that we make our decisions. Our training ground is amazing in so many ways, but it has to change and it needs to adapt to become much more focused around performance.
But if you think about what's important to a player, the pitches I'm going to train on, the room I'm going to get tactically briefed in, the gym where I'm going to do my strength work and the place that I'm going to be with the others in my team to eat and fuel. And three of those four things, we feel that we need to fundamentally change to be more focused on performance.
We now go into the summer and I think have one eye very firmly fixed on the future and one eye also looking back at the mistakes that have been made over the course of a long time. What does the beginning of this reset look like? I know you've already started and it started for you last year, but what does this phase look like now in the short term?
Sure. Well, I think the really important thing is I don't want anyone to take away from this that we've just been sitting around this season, waiting for the season to end, season has been unacceptable and now we need to suddenly spring into action as a reaction to what's happened during the season. That's absolutely not true.
It was completely clear to me in September last year that a reset needed to happen and the reset started then. Have we learned some stuff along the way during the season that will inform that? Absolutely. I'm not for a moment saying we knew all the answers in September.
We've been really focused on recruiting a group of world-leading experts across the club in lots of departments. Some of those people are already here and we're seeing the impact of what they're delivering. Some of those people have only joined recently and some of them will be joining in the next few weeks.
We talked about the squad, we've also got a very important summer transfer window to address the balance issues in the squad. Those areas I've talked about, youth, experience, leadership and robustness. We need to make sure we've got the right tools.
Obviously, recently we've brought in Roberto as our new head coach, an excellent tactical coach. I've been really, really impressed with him and his staff and the working together of the club staff that he wanted to work with and his staff. We really, really believe in Roberto and think he will be a really important part of our future.
Finally, I just wanted to spend a bit of time also talking about the women's team. If I go back to that diagnosis in September, what was very clear was the women's team were not given the right level of prioritisation here. That has completely changed over the last nine months, last year.
We've obviously brought in Martin Ho as the new head coach, a significant investment in the January transfer window, which is much more significant in women's football than it is in men's football. The women's team obviously had a very good season, maybe their best ever, and we'll be investing and going again in this summer transfer window for the women's team.
Because ultimately, where we want to be is we want to have two teams that are competing at the top end of the English game and the top end of the European game. We really want to be seen as one club with two teams.
I think there are a lot of big changes coming and also a large scale of change as well. To make this perhaps more short term, when will fans hear from our leadership over the next few months? What comes next that's tangible that fans can see and experience? What do we do over the course of the next few months to ensure we are taking those right steps in a way that is visible to our supporters?
It's a good question. I think communication is important. You've obviously heard from Peter, our chairman, immediately from the season ending, obviously hearing from me today, and there'll be a few other bits of media work I'm doing around this time as well. And we have our fan advisory board in June, where we'll be sitting down, myself and Peter Charrington, our chairman, will both be there in person to hear from our fan advisory board.
So engagement and communication is important because I also recognise that there is a massive disconnect between the club and its supporters. And we're not going to be able to achieve what we all want to achieve unless we can close that gap and unless everybody can feel together.
It feels like that disconnect, lack of trust, people feeling like the club is here and too corporate, not really here to win. I don't want to speak on behalf of all fans because all fans have got different opinions, but that's the feedback I hear, has built up over a long time.
We need to find a way to try and bring everybody together and that's on us.
Finally, I wondered if you had a message for our fans who I think, home and away, have been absolutely magnificent for the team this season?
Well, the first thing I just wanted our supporters to know and reassure them is that we absolutely understand their pain. So we're not sitting here in an ivory tower, not understanding what our supporters feel. We're at games, home and away.
Most of us work in Tottenham, lots of us live in the local area, so we absolutely understand the supporters' pain and it's not been a short, sharp pain. It's been a long, long season that has been torturous at times, embarrassing, unacceptable. So we completely get the supporters' pain and they are right to feel all of that.
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.
