Dear Mr Levy,
Thank you for taking the time to write to me and my fellow Spurs supporters.
In response to your letter, which covered many different areas including addressing some of the criticism levelled at you personally for your leadership of the club, I should like to take the time to respond to your letter in kind.
In your letter you say, “We always take decisions in the best interests of our club at the time we make them”. Of course you do. However, unfortunately that is often the very source of the problem, is it not?
In the 7 years you have been in charge, you have now appointed 6 Managers/Head Coaches. I am sure they all seemed like the correct appointments at the time, but then something changed and you decided instead to move in a completely different direction.
Nobody doubts that you think you are doing the right thing at the time, but with each new appointment comes the conclusion that you feel you had previously chosen the wrong manager. This proves that you clearly do not know what you are doing.
As much as I hate to admit it, I must credit the Arsenal board of directors for how they have run their club over the past 20 years. Every decision they make always has the best interests of the long-term future of the club at heart. Take a look, Mr Levy, at how that club has grown and flourished.
In stark contrast, every footballing change you have made as chairman of the club has been a knee-jerk reaction to the specific failings in the previous regime, and in this sense it has been blatantly short-termist and poorly thought out.
For example, you fired George Graham because you felt some of his comments might encourage Sol Campbell to leave the club, to obvious little effect. Thus a team of characters learning how to win together was broken up in favour of creating one mired in the traditions of the so-called glory days with Glen Hoddle chosen to lead the blind (or otherwise punished by God). Instantly, all our characters were replaced by the likes of 35-year-old Teddy Sheringham, perennially injured Jamie Redknapp (to play in midfield alongside perennially injured Darren Anderton), the gutless Gus Poyet, and the hapless Milenko Acimovic and Goran Bunjevcevic. Remember them?
Most disturbingly, through these painful early years you chose to accept the counsel of alleged kerb crawler and all around village idiot David “the sight is in end” Pleat. What kind of football chairman listens to the advice of a man who tells his TV audience, “For those of you watching in black and white, Spurs are in the all yellow strip…”?
In more recent times, you fired Martin Jol because of a slow start to a season which you were so desperate to rescue in a vain attempt to crowbar the club into the Premiership’s top four. Now you have fired Ramos in an attempt to rescue this season in similar fashion. Where will it end?
For now, it seems we are scrapping the role of Sporting Director. I agree with your assertion that the success of a football club is not about structure or job titles, but about people. Damien Comolli was clearly not the right person to replace Frank Arnesen. That does not necessarily mean scrapping the role altogether is the right move. This step was obviously taken with Redknapp in mind.
Knowing Harry Redknapp to detest not having full control over player transfers, it seems the role of Sporting Director had to go. In your letter, you claim we are not in this position because of any single individual. That’s true. The advantage now is that you will now only have to sack one person when you decide Redknapp has not worked out any better than his predecessors.
Undoubtedly Redknapp’s influence and Premier League savvy will save us from the position we currently find ourselves in. However, will the safety of mid-table be sufficient enough a league position to satisfy you next season? Of course not. With you as Chairman, a Tottenham Manager’s shelf-life is only as long as the next short-term goal. One wonders how long a 61-year-old Manager is destined to stay in the job.
None of this will matter of course when the club is sold in the next 6-12 months. As long as the club retains its Premier League status, it should still attract the desired number of zeroes.
You claim, “there is an inaccurate perception that our club is run entirely for profit and that football is secondary”. Nobody thinks that. Of course you want to be successful. After all, successful clubs make more money and you are quite right to point out that the two go hand-in-hand. However, demanding success and knowing how to achieve it are two entirely different things.
At the start of last season you demanded a finish inside the top four. Why? Why did you feel it was a good idea to burden an improving, young team and a good manager with that unnecessary extra pressure? We were all frustrated with a lack of progress in games against the top teams in the Premier League and many of us did have our reservations about whether Martin Jol was the right man to take us any higher than fifth in the league, but nobody demanded he be sacked immediately and certainly not in the disgraceful manner in which it was carried out.
Such actions not only embarrass us fans but also cast the club in a very poor light with the media. Of course we true fans are still going to love our club through thick and thin but we still value the respect and good wishes of neutrals and fans of other clubs. We want to be the non-Spurs fans’ second club. This becomes impossible when we conduct our business in such an unsavoury manner and are quite rightly slammed for it in all quarters of the media.
Seemingly not satisfied with ruining the 2007-2008 season, you then soured a very promising pre-season campaign again this year by allowing this Dimitar Berbatov nonsense to drag on right through to the very end of the transfer window. How can you honestly expect us to believe that, “the final decision to sell Dimitar was not a financial one but a footballing one”? Poppycock.
Your letter admits Berbatov wanted to join Manchester United as early as the Summer of 2007. You should have drawn a line under this whole affair at that point. Anyone who knows anything about football or about any sport knows that there is no point in persisting with a player who does not want to play for your team. It is poisonous to team spirit and without team spirit you simply cannot achieve real success.
When Gareth Barry was flirting with joining Liverpool over the summer, Aston Villa did not want him to leave but eventually they accepted they had no choice but to let him leave if the offer was right. They then set a deadline for Liverpool to complete the deal.
This is the crucial difference between the failed Barry deal, and the Berbatov deal. Aston Villa knew a long drawn-out saga would only end up hurting their own club so they set a deadline for BEFORE the start of the season for Liverpool to try and complete the deal, and if they did not, then tough luck. The date passed, Villa said that was that, and they were able to start the season with their squad already in place. They did not let the affair spoil the atmosphere at the club for the start of the season.
The most vexing claim your letter makes is that, “the timing of the transfer was completely immaterial and unconnected to our bringing in a replacement for him”. Oh please. How stupid do you think we are? If that was the case why was this deal for the loan of Frazier Campbell concluded at 11.59 PM on transfer deadline day with the very club who were buying Berbatov.
Your ridiculous obsession with squeezing every last penny out of Manchester United has backfired completely. Now we have had to spend all our profit from the sale of Berbatov on paying off an entire coaching team, a director of football and compensating yet another club for poaching their manager. How ludicrous your “tough stance” over Berbatov appears now.
Your stewardship of our beloved club has forced us to suffer one blunder after another. Every footballing decision you have taken has been made with purely short-term motives in mind. This has led to constant flip-flopping within the club which has left us with no solid base of stability for our players and coaches to build upon.
We need leadership from the boardroom. We need someone in charge with a vision for success and who has a clear idea of how to achieve that success, instead of endless quick-fixes.
Whether he turns out to be a successful Tottenham manager or not, Mr. Levy, your decision to appoint Harry Redknapp is just another in a long line of quick fixes and that is simply not good enough for our club.
Therefore, for the sake of our club, you must resign.
Soccersnobs.
