Daniel

Levy was reportedly dispatched by Tottenham owners, the Lewis family, and their ENIC group on Thursday night, with reports suggesting the move was motivated by a desire to, essentially, win stuff.

Large portions of the Tottenham fanbase became disillusioned with Levy’s apparent penny-pinching and perceived failure to re-invest commercial windfalls. His lack of ambition ultimately yielded a dusty trophy cabinet. And that has made everyone cross.

Ironically, Levy’s final two major acts for Spurs – winning a trophy and getting rinsed in the transfer market (more on that later) – are just about the most fundamentally ‘un-Spursy’ notes Levy could have ended on.

However, while no chairman is without blemish, certainly not after almost a quarter of a century running the joint, Levy should go down as one of the most positively influential people in Tottenham Hotspur Football Club history. Here’s why.

To accept the merits of Levy, you have to accept what Spurs were prior to his appointment as executive chairman during the 2001/02 season.

Spurs had finished in the bottom-half on five consecutive occasions, with one League Cup trophy in a decade. The 1980s represented a purple patch and there were, of course, great glories in previous generations, but in the Premier League era, Spurs simply attended the party and left without making a scene.

Enter Levy. In 19 of 20 seasons between 2004/05 and 2023/24, Spurs finished inside the top half of the table. Better still, 13 of those seasons concluded with Spurs among the top five, while they enjoyed 13 consecutive seasons of European football.

In parallel to generally raising standards throughout the club, Levy earned his reputation for being one of the shrewdest sellers around, extracting close to £90 million for Gareth Bale, still inside the top 10 fees ever received by a British team.

He coaxed 435 appearances and 280 goals out of academy lad Harry Kane before selling Spurs’ beloved son to Bayern Munich for up to £100m – a staggering fee for an asset on the wrong side of 30 years old.

Missing out on Eberechi Eze to rivals Arsenal was a clear, uncharacteristic failure, though clear details of precisely how the deal imploded remain in-house.

Not all of Spurs’ reinvestments paid dividends, but his dealings yielded seven major finals during his tenure. Tottenham won the League Cup in 2008 and the Europa League in 2025. Four League Cup finals and the 2019 Champions League final were all lost.

Now, is it more difficult to reach a final, or win one? Levy was not responsible for Ben Thatcher’s rebound into the path of Matt Jansen to opening the scoring in the 2002 final, nor did he cause time to stand still to allow Brad Friedel a chance to deny Les Ferdinand’s header from becoming an equaliser.

He did not miss a penalty in the 2009 shootout against Manchester United, nor did the ball deflect off his leg over a well-positioned Hugo Lloris to gift Chelsea the advantage in the 2015 final, nor did the ball strike his arm after 24 seconds of the 2019 Champions League final to hand Liverpool a penalty and drastically change the course of the game.

You can make a reasonable case that ultimately the buck stops with the chairman, that these players were in the employ of Spurs and a looser hand with the chequebook would have seen better players in those crucial moments, but this rudimentary logic overlooks the fact he built teams capable of reaching those moments in the first place.

Had a handful of moments fallen the other way, Levy could be stepping down with a Champions League win and five League Cup trophies to accompany the Europa League title. And surely an unrivalled legacy among Spurs fans? In fact, he wouldn’t be stepping down at all.

Levy appointed wheelers and dealers: Harry Redknapp. He recruited up-and-coming stars: Mauricio Pochettino, Andre Villas-Boas. He appointed serial winners: Antonio Conte, Ange Postecoglou. He even appointed the Special One. Of course, not all appointments can be expected to work out, many have failed, but in each time, each context, Levy was not one to scrimp on finding the right boss.

Tottenham are widely regarded among the big six teams in the biggest league in world football. Their stadium – strangely used as a stick to beat Spurs with because it can’t play up front or hit top bins in cup finals – is among the best in the world, custom-built to maximise revenue streams, an essential part of the PSR era that does precisely fall under the remit of the chairman. Their state-of-the-art training ground rivals any in the world.

Spurs are, in essence, Andy Murray. Competing at the top in an era of GOATs, with an overall record that doesn’t do the underlying work justice and would have shone brighter without the fitness issues.

Clubs of a similar calibre and history – Newcastle, Aston Villa, Everton, grand old clubs with vast fanbases – have not fared nearly as well as Spurs under Levy.

The former pair were both relegated as recently as 2016. Newcastle ended a SEVENTY-YEAR wait for a major domestic trophy in 2025, while Villa have gone without silver since 1996.

Everton spent over three-quarters of a billion pounds on transfers between allowing David Moyes to join Manchester United in 2013 and David Moyes returning to the club in 2025. All that cash transformed them from top-six regulars into, err, perennial relegation candidates.

During the Levy era, Tottenham fans have watched Leeds implode, Sunderland go to the brink, West Ham still fail to articulate what The West Ham Way actually is, and Leicester enjoy a 5000/1 season, receive their flowers and march back to obscurity.

In terms of the ‘big six’, Chelsea were bankrolled to the top in a time when clubs had freedom to do so, Manchester City struck gold (or oil) with their revolutionary ownership group, while Manchester United appear rotten to the core and for all Arsenal’s impressive squad-building program under Mikel Arteta, where is their Premier League title? Where is their European trophy? One piece of major silverware has arrived at the Emirates since Arsene Wenger departed in 2018 – an FA Cup. Hardly a haul to consign Spurs to the shadows.

To crack into the upper echelons is one thing, to stay there has been a whole other success story. Maybe a successor will build on solid foundations to increase the flow of silver, or maybe a successor, armed with a mandate to win trophies, will spend reckless sums and undermine the work done so far. This should be a nervous time for the fans.

Of course, last season’s 17th-place finish was a dire blotch on the record. But Spurs’ start to the fresh season, with a full squad free from injuries, with a tactically adept manager not wedded to a kamikaze style of play, with around £180m invested into the playing squad – including Xavi Simons, whose deal to Chelsea was impeccably hijacked in the wake of missing Eze – demonstrates last term was an anomaly. It will not be repeated.

Spurs’ consistency under Levy has been, by metrics purged of entitlement, an incredible triumph since 2001. But for his leadership, the Premier League would boast a ‘big five’ – and Tottenham Hotspur would not be part of it.

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