There are two ways to become popular as a sports owner. The harder of the two is to win a championship and not act like an ass about it; the simpler one is firing someone your customers dislike. At Tottenham Hotspur, the first is apparently out of the question, which meant the owners went to Option B and binned polarizing chairman Daniel Levy. Suddenly, backing Spurs no longer came with the requisite "Yeah, but..."
Levy had been on the job for 24 years, so it isn't like he didn't get an opportunity to show what he could do. He could, even, show off what he did—Levy was instrumental in getting the Spurs a new stadium to replace the venerable but dated White Hart Lane, most notably, and so on the real estate level he was perfectly fine. But he also had become a slightly less noxious British version of Jerry Jones, only without the money. Ever Visible/Never Sympathetic is a tough lane for a team exec, and Levy never made it look easy. He liked firing coaches—Thomas Frank, the current manager, is Levy's 14th—and glowering from his seat like a dyspeptic landlord, and emerged over time as Tottenham's foremost Reason We Can't Have Nice Things.
There is rarely a comeback from that, and as we said, Tottenham had become the Premier League's Big Club That Does Small Stuff. Put another way, Spurs reached a Champions League final under Mauricio Pochettino and then celebrated by firing him five months later because of "extremely disappointing" league results. That, too, was Daniel Levy.
In all, he had become an easily detestable cartoon, and one who for lack of public relations instincts or effort leaned and leaned and leaned into his image until he had become Spurs in the way that Jerry has become the Cowboys. If Jerry had a boss, he’d have been fired for that, too.
This was not a spur-of-the-moment (sorry) decision either. The team’s actual owner, Joe Lewis, who was Levy's partner at the investment company ENIC when the team was purchased in 2001 from the equally caricatured Monopoly man Sir Alan Sugar, had made other changes at the upper levels of management this summer as supporter discontent reached a state of persistent protest. Lewis had seemed to be inching toward this moment, but nobody who pays attention to Premier League oligarchs was convinced it would happen until it did.
And now Spurs face a new fan crisis, which is who to blame for tomorrow's failures. Levy was a properly comprehensive catch-all for all the club's various sins. The player budget, the lack of superstar ambitions, the lack of trophy case paraphernalia, the coaching trap door that just wouldn’t stay shut—it all negated the fact that Tottenham became one of the world's wealthiest clubs due in considerable part to Levy's financial acumen. The problem with being a sports owner is that while you may think it's a business, your patrons keep thinking it's a sport. When that becomes a problem, so will you.
But the problem with being a sports fan is that without someone to blame for your team's particular version of suck, you are left with a multitiered but no less existential choice to make—become a kick-me sign for all your friends, give up the team, give up the sport, or give up your friends. You can see the West Sacramento Athletics for proof of this conundrum, and no one is dumping their friend group because they’re too rude about Jeffrey Springs. Levy served as a bonding agents for Spurs fans by being so relentlessly and persistently Levy, which if nothing else is a highly underrated service in these tense and fractious times. Frank seems too likable and too good at his job to serve in that unifying hate object role, and the Lewis family certainly isn't volunteering. The safest play here is to make Chelsea owner Todd Boehly the bad guy, but that hardly scratches the itch for fans who know that the purest hatred is the hatred of your own. Why else are the Dallas Cowboys still popular?
As Levy leaves, the Spurs have gained good will and lost a crucial safety valve for collective ire. It will be fun to see how quickly they squander the first and who they offer as the second. And it will be educational to see how necessary self-loathing is in the entire process, not just for Spurs fans but for your favorite team, when the time comes. Probably Sunday at the latest.
