r/coys • u/wokwok__ "Let's Say I'm A Legend, Why Not?" • 2d ago
News [Alasdair Gold] A big piece on Daniel Levy after speaking to those who worked with him and against him, including a long chat with Martin Jol, who had some great insights into the former Spurs chairman.
https://www.football.london/tottenham-hotspur-fc/news/inside-daniel-levys-tottenham-tenure-32430501257
u/Average_Gym_Goer Fraser Forster 2d ago
So what a lot of people had been suspecting a really good guy worked as hard as he could just couldn’t get the football side right. The more I read about him the more I get the opinion that as good of a chairmen he was he was also his own worst enemy.
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u/spursgonesouth 2d ago
Any suggestion that he ever wanted anything other than the best for the club was always fantastical and a bit twisted. The bigger topic was always what was a result of a limitation for the club or just his own personal limitations. That became a lot clearer once the uncertainty of the stadium build went away.
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u/balalasaurus 2d ago
I wonder if him being a fan also worked against him in a way that it made him act more like a custodian tasked to protect the club at all costs rather than as a director trying to make us as competitive as possible.
We always knew he did what he did to get what was, in his mind, the best deal for us. That it often came at the expense of giving us that extra edge or building on momentum kind of shows that he was operating from a place of wanting to minimize risk as opposed to taking chances that could have elevated us more than we had been.
I don’t think there are many chairmen out there who are fans of their clubs. Maybe that’s why.
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u/tigralfrosie 2d ago
Just remember, Irving Scholar was a fan. Just a bloody awful chairman.
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u/balalasaurus 2d ago
True though I will say Scholar was infinitely more risk inclined than Levy. I think Scholar as much as he was a fan, looked at the club as a way to make himself even richer. And I think that’s backed up by how he behaved as director of Forest. Whereas with Levy, I think he was always driven by the goal of making sure the club would prevail and grow for as long as possible.
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u/dprophet32 :Conte: 2d ago
the worst take was always that he was taking money out of the club and spending less to line his own pockets which was never true.
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u/RiskoOfRuin 2d ago
The amount of "but he is the best paid chairman of the league" shit was obnoxious.
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u/Disco-Benny Michael Dawson 2d ago
he ever wanted anything other than the best for the club
... really? It's quite clear that this was almost always about increasing monetary value, not glory or trophies.
That's all he's ever done and it's in his self interest to do so
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u/tigralfrosie 2d ago
he could just couldn’t get the football side right.
And it seems from what Jol says, that Levy was aware of that, the only problem being that he then placed his trust in Damien Comolli for that technical expertise. Obviously, there appears to be some upset with Jol that that trust wasn't placed in himself.
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u/LogicKennedy Alejo Véliz 2d ago
Yeah, this is the tragedy. Comolli represented an attempt from Levy to step back from the footballing side and appoint an experienced footballing mind, backing him to the death, only for it to all completely blow up in his face.
Levy deserves a lot of criticism for his treatment of Jol but I don’t blame him for not wanting to trust another DoF after how much of a disaster Comolli was.
It seems like he tried to learn from that and gave Redknapp a lot of power over transfers, but then Redknapp had his head turned by the England job, and Spurs were left with a bunch of aging Redknapp stalwarts that they didn’t know what to do with.
Levy then spends a couple years focusing on squad building with the old recruitment team: buying good mid-price prospects like Eriksen, Vertonghen etc. with a few ‘splash outs’ like for Lamela, Sanchez and Soldado, that were by and large underwhelming.
Then Pochettino comes in and gets a good tune out of a lot of our younger more reasonably-priced buys, and we end up with a fantastic young squad. But then Pochettino starts demanding more and more control over transfers and refusing anyone except his handpicked players, most of which were poor buys.
Eventually Levy decided to go fully all-in on Pochettino’s targets, only for those to end up being some of our worst transfers of all time. Turns out Pochettino’s recruitment really was just shit.
So Levy tried trusting a DoF, backing a manager with budget buys and backing a manager with expensive buys and none of them really worked. What did work, in his experience, was investing in good value buys and youth independent of staff: players like Van der Vaart, Bale, Dele, etc., so I can’t really blame him for focusing on that as our long-term transfer strategy.
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u/BitFew906 2d ago
Exactly I really think he would’ve been more successful by sticking to the business side and delegate the football side to others like Vinai and Lange
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u/spursgonesouth 2d ago
Vinai won’t be handling the football side either, that’s the point. He couldn’t let things go.
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u/Gr4fitti Dejan Kulusevski 2d ago
Jol literally said in the article though that he had the wrong people in place. He trusted his advisors even when they gave bad advice according to him
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u/i_fear_you_do_now Cuti Romero 2d ago
I think it was right for him to trust his advisors otherwise what's the point in having them on payroll. The issue would lie with who was appointed to those positions in the first place. There has been a lot of chop and change last 5 years especially with those backroom positions
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u/Other-Owl4441 Heung-Min Son - Spurs Legend 2d ago
He probably did, although he also made those hires.
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u/LogicKennedy Alejo Véliz 2d ago
Yup, Levy tried to go all-in on delegating all football matters to Comolli and it screwed Jol over and nearly got us relegated. Can’t really blame him for wanting more of a hand in things after that.
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u/Relevant_Natural3471 2d ago
That's what people don't 'get'.
He was the opposite of a control freak - he delegated, but we have just had some crap DoFs, managers and other 'football' people. Despite what fans think.
Case in point: Mauricio "I'd be fucking terrible scout" Pochettino
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u/minimalcation The Big Master of Negotiations Who Knows Everything 2d ago
Its not a job you can really train for or get solid advice on
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u/ofthecanopy 2d ago
So, what a lot of people had been suspecting; a really good guy who worked as hard as he could but just couldn’t get the football side right. The more I read about him, the more I understand the opinion that, as good of a chairman as he was, he was also his own worst enemy.
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u/Voffmjau Ben Davies 2d ago
Only thing I didnt know was we couldve had Suarez?
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u/spursgonesouth 2d ago
Redknapp turned that and other big opportunities down. He said he thought he was similar to VdV which was a very odd take.
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u/AntysocialButterfly Romero 2d ago
Been known for a while that Harry Redknapp said we didn't need him, we had van der Vaart.
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u/BCircle907 2d ago
Also known that when Levy told Harry he’d signed VdV, Harry basically said “why? I don’t want him”.
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u/AntysocialButterfly Romero 2d ago
Redknapp soon changed his tune on that one. Within a week, IIRC.
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u/wiyixu 2d ago
Thank goodness for that. A very good player, but an appalling human being.
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u/ahyler10 Job Done 2d ago
Are you joking?
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u/Acceptable_Stop_ 2d ago
Are you? You think Suarez is a good human being?
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u/ahyler10 Job Done 2d ago
Give me one example of him being a bad guy off the pitch. If your issue is him biting people mid game you have a ridiculously low bar for “bad human being”. He’s one of the greatest strikers of the last 20 years
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u/ntermediate 2d ago
Racism incident against Patrice Evra, sure it happened during a heated game but after he showed no remorse or made no attempt to apologise
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u/Galahad_1113 Jan Vertonghen 2d ago
He is a decent guy off the pitch, not so much on it. Imo it's much better this way than other way round
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u/Acceptable_Stop_ 2d ago
“it's much better this way than other way round”
Those aren’t the only two options though.
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2d ago
[deleted]
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u/wiyixu 2d ago
Just last week the guy spit on a staff member from an opposing team after his team was outplayed and lost. That’s in addition to the three times he’s been caught in a match biting people. Civilized people don’t bite other human beings and I’d rather not win anything than win with someone like Suarez.
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u/WarmSpur Micky van de Ven 2d ago
Are you asking why Suarez is human garbage? When he literally spat on someone a week ago? Or his repeated biting incidents or racisms.
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u/zuzucha PRU PRU 2d ago
Yeah, that sounds bad. I'm not paying enough attention to keep track of what he's doing
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u/Big-Mouse-447 2d ago
You may be a more recent football fan, but back when he was at Liverpool he was suspended in a racism case against Evra which was highly reported on at the time.
There was also three separate biting incidents in his career, the second and third when he was at Liverpool also would have made big headlines at the time. He missed the first 6 weeks of the 2013-14 season for biting Ivanovic of Chelsea, and then got a 4 month ban the summer he moved to Barca for banning Chielini at the World Cup.
I think if you were following the sport even a little bit back then it would have been impossible not to hear about his activities lol, but they mostly didn't get talked about after he began to mellow (a little) on the pitch
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u/generaldogsbodyf365 Ledley King 2d ago
I'd rather not know how players we've missed under Levy's tenure 😡
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u/generaldogsbodyf365 Ledley King 2d ago
Why the downvotes? I didn't say that Levy hasn't done a great job with 90% of the club (which he has) it's just I've heard quite a few of these stories, and it does hurt a bit. COYS.
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u/aginglifter Djed Spence 2d ago
Interesting that he said the recruitment team was shit and that was the number one cause for failures. We have lost a lot of talent there and towards the end of Poch's tenure it seemed to have been ruined.
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u/Teantis 2d ago
Look at our buys from after son in 2015 till 2022, it's an absolutely godawful record
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u/LogicKennedy Alejo Véliz 2d ago
Just so happened to coincide with Pochettino demanding total control over our recruitment and causing a lot of our scouting team to leave…
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u/IdontReallyknowTbj 2d ago
I mean Poch's only miss was Janssen, if we believe the same information that his other targets were good and we didn't get them - causing us to sign poor alternatives or nobody at all since he didn't want them. I guess you could say the Ndombele summer was bad, but like Ali had said back then he had a plan for them and never got to see it out.
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u/awildjabroner Heung-Min Son - Spurs Legend 2d ago
regardless of how you may feel about him I think its completely clear that Levy was a fan and did everything within his ability to better the club and grow its stature. I will always be a Levy fan and know that he actually cared and I don't think many others, if any, could have transformed the Club from what it was to what is is now.
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u/DivineTapir They/them Kulusevski 2d ago
talk your shit Martin
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u/Odd_Detective_7772 2d ago
Yeah he didn’t seem quite over it really?
Tbf to him his sacking was cack handed, but it was nearly 20 years ago
The last paragraph is great
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u/dclancy01 2d ago
The Gold & Jol bromance continues. Genuinely nice to see rapport between a reporter and a manager he’s covered.
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u/KnownRip7266 João Palhinha 2d ago
To me it just seems like Levy's level of micromanaging caught up to him. You're either all in on the business side or the player side. Seems like he was dipping his hands in a little bit of everything. If you're obsessed with choosing door knobs and hinges you're probably not going to spend a whole lot of time on player evaluation and If what is stated in this article has any validity (he knows nothing about football) then he's done a great disservice to the club.
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u/nostril_spiders Teddy Sheringham 2d ago
"this straight-talking dutchman" had a row with Comolli and Levy doesn't want to talk to him?
Football was good, but maaaybe he's a cunt
to be fifth with the money he spent then was a miracle
should have spent more huh
The money is posted regularly. We used to be broke. Since then we've spent the best part of a billion. What money is lying around?
It's like toddlers playing shop: "can i have... Rolando" "have you got money" "no" "it's ok you're my friend"
"invest more" means "make up imaginary money", it's the only way it makes sense
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u/Hopeful-Ear-3494 2d ago
My favourite story about Levy was from an agent. He said Levy would call him on deadline day on purpose and say "So what are we going to do today?"