The Observer

On-pitch performance

Thomas Frank’s arrival brought a warm brand of intelligence after ­decades of manager churn. Expectation has dimmed with unconvincing performances against Aston Villa and Monaco but a relatable head coach is what Spurs needed. Three home wins from 17 Premier League fixtures since November is an anomaly that needs rectifying.

Under a new leadership group of Cristian Romero, Guglielmo Vicario, Ben Davies, Micky van de Ven and James Maddison, Frank has blended long throws and other ­theories from his Brentford days into a solid ­4-2-3-1 that lacks a splash of creativity. The new star is Mohammed Kudus, who is ahead of Kylian Mbappé and Lamine Yamal on dribbles attempted and completed. Kudus is an early contender for signing of the season.

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Other strengths include outstanding centre-backs (Romero and Van de Ven), an accomplished crosser at right-back (Pedro Porro) and a commanding No 6 (João Palhinha). Centre-forward is a weakness. Dominic Solanke’s ankle injury has exposed Richarlison’s inconsistency. Maddison and Dejan Kulusevski are also injured and much missed.

After 17 years without a trophy, May’s Europa League win bought a respite from the old Spursiness and raised self-esteem. But it barely disguised a dreadful league placing of 17th, with 22 defeats in 38.

History

Six Champions League campaigns in 10 seasons is a respectable return for a team built for a top-four finish, but not to be regular title contenders.

Last season aside, they are where data crunchers would expect them to be. The “glory game”, however, calls for more. If “heritage” still matters, fans can be comforted by the Bill Nicholson Gates and the Harry Kane and Ledley King murals. Spurs last won the FA Cup in 1991, the League Cup in 2008 and the title in 1961.

Money talks

If the party line is believable, the Europa League win was an epiphany, jolting the club away from Daniel Levy’s prudence to pleasure seeking.

“The ambition of the Lewis family is really clear,” says Vinai Venkatesham, the chief executive and Levy’s de facto replacement after he was eased out in September. “They want us to be focused on ­driving success on the pitch. They want us to have more nights like the one in Bilbao.”

In the glow of a European conquest the [Joe] Lewis family handed more than £100m of extra funding via 13.5 million new shares in Tottenham Hotspur Limited. A net spend of £154m in this summer’s transfer window was the league’s fourth highest.

Spurs are ninth in the worldwide revenue league (Deloitte) but have the most restrained wage inflation of the top six Premier League clubs – a reflection of Levy’s parsimony.

Fan satisfaction

“Levy out” is in the bin of angry chants. Now Tottenham supporters marvel at the club’s urge to communicate. Venkatesham is an enthusiastic club channel interviewee and joint-sporting directors recently took to the in-house couch to explain their roles.

Fabio Paratici, back after a 30-month Fifa ban for financial irregularities, says his skills are “players, managing players, transfer window, loans and pathways”, while Johan Lange will concentrate on scouting, football insights, performance and the academy. Modern fans devour this kind of detail. With Levy out, Tottenham’s ­followers are mostly ­optimistic the club will “compete”, that ­amorphous hope. Nostalgia still soothes the soul – less so with younger fans, who want gratification now. From the Double winners of 1961 through Ossie Ardiles, Glenn Hoddle and Paul Gascoigne and on to Harry Kane, retrospection was a defence against disappointment and sometimes ridicule.

Products and prospects

An academy that formed Graeme Souness, Hoddle, Peter Crouch, Nick Barmby, Sol Campbell, Ledley King and Kane isn’t prolific these days in sending graduates to the first team.

Paratici, Lange and new performance director, Dan Lewindon will be expected to improve the supply chain from youth to senior levels. No home-grown players started the Villa or Monaco games. Harry Winks (10 England caps) was the most recent hyped starlet but now plays in the Championship at Leicester.

Mikey Moore (on loan at Rangers), Luka Vušković (loan to Hamburg), Alfie Devine (Preston), Luca Williams-Barnet, Tynan Thompson and 16-year-old Jun’ai Byfield are among the most promising prospects.

Ownership

Enic sounds like a privatised energy firm but is one of the more colourful corporate monoliths.

Its 88-year-old overlord, Joe Lewis, born above an East End pub, owns works by Picasso and Matisse and a $250m yacht. In January last year, he pleaded guilty in the US to insider trading after sharing share information with his pilots and ex-girlfriend.

The contrast between Lewis’s tycoon lifestyle and his tight hold on Tottenham’s budgets has long frustrated fans. But nobody could accuse Enic, a “Bahamas-based investment group”, of not building up its asset. It owns 85% of the club’s share capital, and is in turned owned by the Lewis family (70%) and the Levy family (30%). Officially the club, worth about £4bn, is “not for sale” but Lewis and Levy are nicely placed. Three reported overtures went nowhere: from PCP International Finance Limited, a consortium called Firehawk Holdings and the American Brooklyn Earick.

Women’s team

Yet to finish in the top three after six years in the Women’s Super League, Tottenham women are showing flashes of promise under new manager Martin Ho, after nine months without a victory. Four wins from six this season is an auspicious start.

They play at Leyton Orient’s Brisbane Road (capacity: 9,271) but at least three WSL games will be held at the main stadium: Chelsea (8 Feb), Everton (15 March) and Manchester United (26 April). A designated new training ground is planned next to the main Enfield complex.

Ho says of the club’s owners: “We are well supported. They are doing everything they can to make sure we grow … they have some really ambitious plans for this team.”

The club’s facilities

Here at least they are undisputed champs. Other clubs squirmed with envy when they saw the Enfield training complex. The £1bn stadium (62,850) adjacent to the old White Hart Lane site feels like an NFL arena transplanted to N17 – but without the good transport infrastructure. The NFL logo next to the Spurs one on the stadium supports the analogy. Two more American football games were staged there this autumn.

Opened in 2019, the ground is designed to be vertiginous and lifestyle-y, with Europe’s longest bar, a retractable playing surface and much sustainability cred.

Atmosphere

The 17,500-seat South Stand beneath a giant golden cockerel was conceived as a wall of noise, modelled on Borussia Dortmund’s, but the mood can be subdued when the entertainment level dips, which is true these days of most big grounds.

But a chant not heard since the Uefa Cup win of 1984 has returned: “Champions of Europe”. The victorious manager, Postecoglou, has since been sacked twice in 135 days.

José Mourinho has never really been the sort to allow time to heal a wound. By the time Tottenham Hotspur lifted the Europa League in May, a little more than four years had elapsed since his acrimonious departure from the club. He might have been expected to have mellowed, just a little, perhaps even to have allowed whatever resentment he once felt at his dismissal to have ripened into fondness.

But Mourinho has never yet encountered a bruise he is unwilling to punch. Mischief always trumps magnanimity. “Tottenham plays [in the] Champions League,” he said, when asked for a message of congratulation for his former employers. “And of course for Mr Levy, the millions that the Champions League gives, for him, is the best news.”

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In many ways, it’s a classic Mourinho line: cutting, comprehensive, a knuckle-duster barely disguised by a velvet glove. It captures, in perfect clarity, exactly how football has seen Levy over the quarter of a century that he ran Tottenham. It casts him as an avatar for some combination of parsimony and avarice. It blurs the line between the institution and the individual. And, most of all, it indicates quite how large Levy has come to loom in our collective imagination.

It would not be quite accurate to describe Tottenham’s now former executive chair as the Premier League’s first celebrity executive. David Dein, his analogue on the other side of north London, was a prominent figure in the 1990s with Arsenal, some time before Levy took the reins at White Hart Lane. Manchester United fans had strong views on their club chair Martin Edwards throughout the 1980s; Anfield generally thought well of Liverpool chief executive Peter Robinson.

That Levy has had a comparable profile for the last two decades – that his face has become as familiar to many fans as those of the 13 permanent managers he hired and/or fired during his tenure – can be largely attributed to the character traits which Mourinho emphasised so deliberately. In the popular imagination, the 63-year-old was the hard-nosed, tight-fisted pinchpenny, the man whose approach to negotiating was so painful that Sir Alex Ferguson once compared it unfavourably with a hip replacement.

It was an image that gained traction in the four years that Levy worked with Harry Redknapp, a manager seen basically as his antithesis. They were projected almost as a comic duo: the wheeler dealer and the miser, the spendthrift and the skinflint. Even Redknapp acknowledged that they made for an “odd couple”, although he did not think that was especially unusual. “Anyone working with Daniel would be an odd couple,” he once said.

That he should have crossed paths with Redknapp at precisely the point when the game’s obsession not just with transfers but with the powerbrokers who conducted them was becoming all-consuming meant it was their relationship that came to define him in public perception.

That Levy oversaw a transformation at Tottenham is both widely understood and strangely overlooked. As Ian Graham, the pioneering analytics guru who would win fame for his work at Liverpool but who started in football as an external consultant for Spurs, points out in How To Win The Premier League, Tottenham were a “mid-table Premier League team, averaging 51 points per season” between 1992 and 2008. Levy’s “financial acumen and running of the club”, he writes, helped them shed that image.

In the 17 seasons since, Spurs have missed out on European competition just twice. They are, and they see themselves as, a Champions League club. They have made the finals of both of Europe’s major club competitions. They have one of the most sophisticated and well-regarded training facilities in world football; they have a stadium seen as the best in the Premier League.

And they have done it all while retaining tight control of their finances; Deloitte, in its most recent report into the economics of the Premier League, found that Spurs spend just 42% of their income on wages. Levy is not popular with his peers; plenty complain that trying to do business with Spurs is too exhausting to be worthwhile. Other Premier League executives, though, have always been staggered by the amount of vitriol heaped upon him. Spurs, after all, may well be the best-run club in England.

That there were protests against Levy’s role even as Spurs made their way to the Europa League final against Manchester United last season suggests that none of that concerns fans quite so much as his apparent unwillingness to loosen the purse-strings.

His determination to “drive a hard bargain at the best of times”, as Redknapp wrote in his autobiography, Always Managing, has not been seen as a positive, proof of cool, rational stewardship. Football is an industry that values the cavalier more than the cautious. Levy’s prudence has been cast instead as a lack of ambition, even greed.

There is some truth to that. As Antonio Conte once said, amid the ruins of his own time at Tottenham: “Twenty years there is the owner, and they never won something. But why?”

Levy’s approach has come at a cost: they have missed out on players because some see Tottenham as a dead end, not a through road; Levy’s insistence on waiting until the last minute to strike a deal has always made more business sense than sporting; failing to bolster Mauricio Pochettino’s resources after they lost the Champions League final to Liverpool in 2019 counts as a colossal missed opportunity.

Judging by the statement published on behalf of the Lewis family in response to his departure on Thursday night, the club have adopted that version of history. “They want what the fans want: more wins, more often,” as a source close to Tottenham’s controlling owners said. Nobody thought to mention that such a sentiment is only possible because of all that Levy, popular or not, has done.

Levy’s time at Spurs

Appointed as club chair

A lifelong fan, he takes charge aged just 39, warning there must be a balance between shareholders “who want profit” and fans “who want success”. “Sometimes,” he said, “the two do not go together.”

Tottenham win League Cup

The first trophy, won by Juande Ramos, the fourth permanent manager that Levy had appointed.

Spurs make Champions League

Under Harry Redknapp, Spurs finish fourth and qualify for Europe’s elite for the first time.

New stadium, title miss

Construction on the new stadium begins in the summer of 2015. The following season, Spurs push for the title until a late collapse sees Leicester win it.

Champions League final

The first game in their new £1bn stadium takes place in April. Two months later, they lose the Champions League final 2-0 to Liverpool.

Another trophy chance wasted

José Mourinho is sacked a week before the League Cup final. Spurs lose and go on to finish seventh in the league.

Europa League glory

Spurs sink to 17th in the league under Ange Postecoglou but their season is saved by beating Manchester United in Europe.

Levy out after almost 25 years

Levy is said to be “heartbroken” at being eased out as the owners insist they want “more wins, more often”.

There is still so much to discover about this version of Tottenham Hotspur under Thomas Frank but one early trait has already revealed itself: resilience.

The heartbreak of losing on ­penalties to Paris Saint-Germain in the UEFA Super Cup after leading until the 94th minute was soothed by a commanding 3-0 win at home to Burnley, in what Frank billed as a “dream start”.

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The club’s supporters would no doubt argue that because this is Tottenham Hotspur, any elation must be followed by outright disappointment. Missing out on Eberechi Eze when his arrival from Crystal Palace seemed all but secured is one thing, but to see him go to Arsenal? The ­consensus seems to be that however Eze fares at the Emirates – rather well, you would expect – Spurs ­supporters will never hear the end of it from their nearest and not so dearest rivals.

Hence the early but not unexpected chants yesterday from the travelling supporters in the top of the South Stand demanding: “We Want Levy Out”, exasperated by Spurs’ ­perceived dithering by failing to sign Eze before Arsenal had made their move. And then Spurs were 2-0 up, and those calls for Levy’s departure had been replaced by “Champions of Europe, we know what we are”. Winning makes everyone happy, even if the discontent among Spurs supporters with how Levy operates is unlikely to go anywhere any time soon.

One problem for Frank was that he had already billed the Burnley win last week as the perfect start. This performance was even better, with plenty to like about how Spurs absorbed long spells of pressure in the first half and then repelled it back at their hosts, forcing mistakes with their own pressing.

Pep Guardiola noted in his pre-match comments how his side had “suffered” facing Frank’s Brentford teams in the past and here was another taste of that pain. João Palhinha, the on-loan signing from Bayern Munich, capitalised on James Trafford’s error for Spurs’ second goal and was generally excellent, combining with Rodrigo Bentancur to unpick City’s midfield physically. Djed Spence at full-back was similarly impressive, showing a calm head along with the rest of Spurs’ defence.

And then there was Richarlison. Frank’s comments in the week regarding the Brazilian felt pointed, giving the striker his undisputed backing when he declared “right now, he is my starting nine”. When City were piling on the pressure in the first half Richarlison barely saw the goal, his back turned and John Stones all over him, desperately trying to hold up the ball to give Spurs an outlet to escape from their own half.

With the first real chance he had to slip behind Manchester City’s defence chasing a long ball, Richarlison caught out Stones and stayed onside by the finest of margins – a tight enough call that it required a VAR check – to set up Brennan Johnson for the opening goal.

Tottenham Hotspur, of course, came here last season and inflicted record-breaking misery on Pep Guardiola, that 4-0 win handing Manchester City’s illustrious manager a fifth straight defeat for the first time in his managerial career. But at that point City were stuck in a downward spiral and Spurs capitalised.

This was a revamped Manchester City side who cruised to victory at Wolves on the opening weekend when the three recruits who arrived in time for the Club World Cup – Rayan Aït-Nouri, Rayan Cherki and Tijjani Reijnders – all made positive contributions, particularly Reijnders with a goal and an assist. One week later and Aït-Nouri was forced off in the first half after a knock to his ankle, Cherki made way after 54 minutes and Reijnders was noticeably quieter.

The timing of the Club World Cup led to City moving quickly in the transfer market and meant that trio bedded in early ahead of the new season. That was not the case for goalkeeper James Trafford, re-signed from Burnley at the end of last month and currently City’s starter in goal, while Ederson’s future is decided ahead of the transfer window closing on 1 September.

Presumably the agent of Gianluigi Donnarumma, linked heavily with a move to the Etihad in recent weeks following his exile at PSG, rubbed their hands with glee at the sight of Trafford dozily ­trying to find Nico González inside his own box, inviting Pape Matar Sarr to poach back the ball before Palhinha hammered home.

City were surprisingly flat after half-time bar an injection of urgency off the bench from Jérémy Doku, unlike in the first half when Omar Marmoush had a couple of chances and Erling Haaland headed over the bar. Perhaps the ongoing construction of the North Stand at the Etihad is an accurate metaphor for where Manchester City currently are.

“Manchester City, it’s happened again”, sang the away supporters as City’s fans headed for an early exit, cheering their third victory in four matches in this fixture over the past year. Except this time Manchester City had not come into this fixture reeling from a lack of form or facing questions about their identity.

Spurs were organised, composed, rode out the periods when the heat was turned up, pressed diligently and had the pace out wide to worry opponents.

Sprinkle in a couple more signings before the window shuts and they might have something. But even if not, the core of the side who ground out this win were already at the club when Frank arrived, a testament to his talent as a manager.

Just before 1.30pm on Saturday, on the corner of Brereton Road, two men stretched to display a homemade banner reading “Built a business, killed a football club”. While Sheffield Wednesday and Morecambe peer into the abyss, Change For Tottenham were “here in the hope to push the club into making serious transfers to strengthen our squad, to enable us to challenge on all fronts”.

Fans filing into the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium ignored them as only Londoners can, as though their pessimism might be contagious. When their arms and anger tired, the banner was draped limply over a bollard. Stonewall it was not.

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Change for Tottenham demand “a club where football matters above commercial interests”, but also “investment in footballing success”, presumably with money raised from some sort of whip-round. Tottenham have the fourth-highest net spend in football since 2019, spending £50m less than Paris Saint-Germain and £250m more than Real Madrid in that period. Levy wrote the playbook for how modern football clubs should be run off the pitch. It cannot have helped their cause that 30 minutes prior, reports emerged that Eberechi Eze was unlikely to play for Crystal Palace on Sunday as his move to Tottenham accelerated.

But as easy as it is to mock the protesting pair, their feelings are also understandable. Life in the Postecoglou family was chaotic and emotional and all-encompassing, but most of all deeply confusing. A first trophy in 17 years, and 17th in the Premier League. An inherently likeable man with noble, romantic ideals and a loose grip on reality and fact. Tottenham fans are institutionally predisposed to doom-mongering, far more used to and comfortable in crisis than comfort. Making sense of the neuroses triggered by one of the oddest seasons any football club has endured will take time. Cases of Long Ange are inevitable.

Yet throughout what became a joyous, rollicking 3-0 win over a Burnley side already in “you have to fear for them” territory, there was a distinct new era vibe in the air. This is the first season in over a decade without Harry Kane or Heung-min Son. Thomas Frank prowled around his technical area like a contemporary artist about to unveil a new exhibition exploring his childhood trauma. Richarlison not only opened the scoring with a sharp half-volley, but then contorted himself for a magical overhead kick, both created by Mohammed Kudus’s dancing feet. He had not scored a brace for Tottenham since February 2024 and Daniel Levy has spent the past year attempting to flog him to anyone with a few million quid and poor recruitment advice.

Spurs fans are institutionally predisposed to doom-mongering, more used to crisis than comfort

As Richarlison’s mini-renaissance serves to prove, it is also unclear how good this squad really is. Constant injuries and constant Ange made it difficult to assess individuals last season, with so many seemingly playing closer to the floor of their abilities than the ceiling. We know this is not the 17th-best squad in the league. We also know there is significant unrealised potential. For all the often justified criticism of the club’s recruitment, they have procured some exceptional young players. Lucas Bergvall and Archie Gray, both still 19, and Pape Matar Sarr, 22, all started on Saturday, the potential early days of an extraordinary midfield trio.

Elsewhere, Kudus, James Maddison and Dejan Kulusevski (the latter two both injured) would be one of the most interesting and exciting creative corps in the Premier League, even without Eze. Cristian Romero and Micky van de Ven are among the finest and most balanced central defensive pairings anywhere. Less than a year since his Tottenham career appeared over, Djed Spence has become a remarkable full-back.

Already 3-0 up, Frank brought on Dominic Solanke, Rodrigo Bentancur, João Palhinha and Wilson Odobert and Mathys Tel. Even if it is not perfect, this squad is deeper and better than many are willing to acknowledge, and Frank already has a proven history of rapid and drastic player development, of achieving well beyond his means.

The Champions League campaign will complicate things, as will the inevitable emotional and physical wear and tear of a Premier League season. Every day will not be as gloriously smooth as this. Yet in the heady delirium following Richarlison’s acrobatics, there was a rare sense that all was right in Tottenham’s world, that as effectively as he argued otherwise the worst of the club’s problems might have been exorcised with Postecoglou. As much as fans understandably did not and will not want to admit it, perhaps he was the biggest problem after all.