Tottenham Hotspur dresses beautifully. The suit is designer. The accoutrements are most pleasing on the eye. When visitors arrive at the club’s lavish, landscaped training ground on the northern outskirts of London, they are met by the sight of a putting green by the side of the driveway, manicured so neatly it would not be out of place at Augusta National.
In the academy building, everything is just so. It is faultlessly impressive. Upstairs, there are rows of modern offices. Some have trophies on the desks. A slogan on the wall says ‘Fuel Your Dreams’ or something similarly motivational. Outside, kids do keepy-uppies on pitches that stretch away to far Enfield horizons.
On Friday morning, as some of us are sitting in a semi-circle of chairs in one of these offices, talking to Johan Lange, the one remaining Spurs sporting director, a man appears on the other side of the oblong window set into the door and starts to dust it assiduously. Nothing is out of place.
It is to Spurs’ credit that they make Lange available. As the power of sporting directors increases and increases, it feels right that they should be answerable for their actions, in the same way that managers are. Lange is nice and Lange is careful and Lange talks in platitudes. ‘We are very ambitious to create a team that can play dominant football,’ he says.
Lange is probably also out of here in the summer. That is what everyone expects, anyway. His record is patchy. Recruitment has been alarmingly poor in some areas and many blame him. ‘When are you contracted until at Tottenham?’ someone asks him. Lange looks distinctly uncomfortable. He hesitates. ‘I need to get this correct on English employment law,’ he says.
It begins to feel a bit like the opening scene in Blue Velvet where red roses are framed by a white picket fence, a lollipop lady helps kids cross the road, a golden Labrador rides on a fire truck but the surface of a well-watered lawn conceals a chaos of seething, writhing, scurrying ants beneath.
That is what the modern Spurs looks like. On the outside, everything is wonderful. They have the best new stadium in Europe, a stadium that is a stunning monument to the unparalleled financial acumen of its former executive chairman, Daniel Levy, who was fired after 24 years at the helm last summer.
But the best new stadium in Europe houses one of the worst teams in the English top-flight, a team that sits 16th in the Premier League, five points above the relegation zone, a club that has just fired its manager, Thomas Frank, and appointed a peripatetic coach, Igor Tudor, as it prepares to face top of the table Arsenal in the North London derby.
The firing of Frank has not transformed the mood at the club. It has brought some temporary relief from the brickbats being thrown at him by a frustrated fan-base but it has not changed the fact that this still feels like a club in disarray. Beneath that beautiful suit lies a proud old institution wracked by uncertainty and confusion.
It is a club lacking direction. Levy was the fulcrum of everything. Without him, there is a vacuum of authority that has not been filled by the scions of the Lewis family, the majority owners of the club, who dismissed him. Instead of moving forward without him, there is a feeling that the club has become a rudderless ship.
Even though Vivienne Lewis, the daughter of billionaire Joe Lewis, 89, who heads the family, assumed a prominent public role after the dethroning of Levy, it is becoming increasingly apparent to those close to the situation that the dominant voice in the boardroom is now that of her son-in-law, Nick Beucher.
Beucher’s influence over football affairs at Spurs is a cause of some concern, given that he has no prior experience in the sport or knowledge of the English game. It is not even as if the Lewis family has an ownership role in teams in other sports as is the case with the owners of Arsenal, Liverpool, Chelsea and Manchester United. They are novices, pure and simple.
In the past, Levy shielded them from scrutiny. He took all the flak when things went wrong. Which was often. Now that shield has gone. It has even emerged in recent days that none of Vivienne Lewis, her brother Charles Lewis, and Beucher have taken the Premier League’s Owners’ and Directors’ Test and none of them are in the process of taking it.
That revelation, in turn, has led to renewed speculation that the Lewis family might be preparing to sell the club. They distanced themselves from that idea after the sacking of Levy but Tottenham’s continuing woes and prolonged flirtation with relegation may be weakening their resolve. If Spurs did go down, however, the £4bn they could ask for the club would diminish significantly.
At the same time, there has been a haemorrhaging of confidence in chief executive Vinai Venkatesham, who was only appointed to the post 10 months ago, and whose Arsenal past has always counted against him with Spurs fans.
There is a feeling among many in the game that, without Levy, there is a naivety at the heart of the Spurs football operation and that that naivety was easy to discern in an underwhelming January transfer window and in the lack of succession planning that followed the firing of Frank.
The idea that the removal of Levy would suddenly lead to a transformation in Spurs’ transfer policy and wages structure has also been exploded. Some are even wondering now whether it was always the Lewis family that was the problem and that Levy was just doing their bidding.
Rather than the club repairing itself in the wake of Levy’s departure, rather than the shackles being taken off, it has felt more as if the club is falling apart. Last season, even though the club eventually finished 17th in the league, there was never a fear they would be relegated. This season, the fear is real.
The situation has been made foggier by the machinations in the hierarchy. Fabio Paratici was reappointed as a second sporting director alongside Lange in October last year once a ban for his part in the Plusvalenza financial scandal in Italian football during his time at Juventus had expired.
He was thought to have argued for Frank’s dismissal in November, once he became convinced that the Dane was the wrong fit for the job. He wanted to replace him with then Marseille boss Roberto de Zerbi.
Venkatesham and Lange resisted that idea and last month, amid suggestions he had grown disillusioned by the post-Levy running of the club, it was announced that Paratici would leave to join Fiorentina. His departure has left a big gap in expertise and contacts at a club increasingly under the control of Beucher.
Doubt is everywhere now. Many are openly sceptical about the idea that Spurs have gambled on the short-term appointment of Tudor because they are confident that they will be able to land fan-favourite and former boss Mauricio Pochettino when his reign in charge of the USA men’s team comes to an end after this summer’s World Cup.
Tudor, a fine player but an under-achieving boss, represents a huge gamble in Spurs’ bid to escape relegation but Pochettino may not be the prize awaits even if they do retain their Premier League status.
One source with knowledge of the situation said there had not even been any informal contact between Pochettino and the club, let alone any hint of an agreement for him to take over in the summer.
For now, Tudor is the man entrusted with Spurs’ safety and their future. ‘If things go well,’ Lange said, as the cleaner dusted the window, ‘he could be here for a long time.’ It did not suggest there is an awful lot of long-term planning going on in the building.
A little later on Friday, Tudor addressed the media for the first time in the auditorium downstairs. He was impressive in a way that a man who is comfortable in his own skin is impressive and his manner and his style could not be more different to Frank’s. He has often been referred to, during his various coaching assignments as a ‘hard taskmaster’.
He places a great deal of value on physical fitness and on team bonding and there have been times recently when Spurs look in dire need of both. Tudor took the entire squad out for dinner at a Cypriot restaurant in Muswell Hill on Thursday evening.
He acknowledged in that introductory press conference that he had inherited an ‘emergency situation’ at Spurs. He also said that he preferred not to look at the league table when he was in a job. Plenty of Spurs fans would, no doubt, share that particular predilection.
They know, better than Tudor, that Spurs are in a fight for their lives at the bottom of the Premier League. They know that their club is in stasis. It is in the hands of a chief executive who has little authority, a sporting director who may be leaving in the summer, and an ownership family who know nothing about football and have sacked the man who protected them from scrutiny for so long.
Levy may have been deeply unpopular at Spurs. He was never willing, or able, to allow the club to make the financial commitment to attract the world’s best players for the world’s best fees and on the world’s best wages.
But without him, Spurs are a club adrift. Anything other than a win against Arsenal on Sunday afternoon at their magnificent stadium is likely to leave them even closer to the Armageddon of relegation.
However regularly they trim the borders of that putting green at the training ground, however furiously they clean those oblong windows in the office doors, it is not going to fix what ails a great club that is still sinking.
