I should’ve predicted this, but somehow I suspected that there wouldn’t be any statements from Tottenham Hotspur CEO Vinai Venkatesham or from the current owners the Lewis Family in the wake of Tottenham’s near-disastrous 2025-26 season. Instead we get a virtual data dump this morning — a statement on Tottenham Hotspur’s website from the Lewis Family, and an article in the BBC that stems from what they describe as a 50 minute interview with Venkatesham.
Unfortunately, neither of them provide satisfactory
answers. Instead, the Lewis statement provides hollow platitudes and statements of “we’ll do better next time”, while Venkatesham’s statements provide tepid defenses of obvious mistakes this season. The thing they have in common, though, are implicit suggestions that it’s All Daniel Levy’s Fault™.
First, the Lewis statement — it’s the bare minimum of what I’d expect from an owner’s statement after a disaster of a season, but it rings rather hollow.
To the fans,
As owners of 25 years, we have lived the highs and lows of Spurs with you.
Finishing 17th this and last season does not reflect the stature or potential of this football club. We are bitterly disappointed and share your frustration. You, and we, expect more than this. We know this must never happen again.
Our approach to running the Club is, and has been, to trust the experts to do that, while backing them to be successful. The problems we found were deeper than we realised and were allowed to build over the last few years. We know that has eroded trust and we have to win that back. As owners, we take ultimate responsibility for the situation in which the Club finds itself.
We also take responsibility for rebuilding Spurs. Our ambition is to recapture the spirit of the Club and bring back the excitement, the fearlessness and the bold football we have always felt defined us. That means football comes first. The Board and Executive team have laid out their plans to meet this ambition.
This will require investment – in our teams, the academy, our backroom functions and more – and we are fully committed to this. We are not selling the Club. We are all in. We are investing in it. You will see more of this in the coming months.
We care deeply about Spurs. The rebuild the Club needs, and you deserve, has begun. The change required is deep. It will take time and commitment, but change is happening.
Notably, this is the first time I can remember a statement from the club owners in the 20 years I’ve been a Spurs fan. Joe Lewis was notably always silent, preferring to simply own the club and not really put any effort into actually improving it. That was Levy’s job. Apparently the new regime thinks the only way past their own short term failures is by trodding on Levy’s back on the way to apologize.
Venkatesham, meanwhile, took a path in his interview with the BBC that seems to suggest he didn’t know the mess he was stepping into when he joined. And again, he obliquely seems to blame Levy without actually naming him.
“On my very first day, what I thought would be a realistic target for the men’s first team would be competing for European places. If you’d have asked me a few months after I joined, when I was no longer an outsider, I would have told you the club was in a significantly worse state in some places than I thought.
“That is absolutely not meant to be a criticism of anyone or anything. It was just what I found. It was very clear that this wasn’t some form of turnaround that was required of the club in quite a few areas. It was really a complete reset.
“If I had to generalise, I would say on the non-football side of the club, in particular around stadium operations and commercial, that the club was and is really strong.
“I think if you look at the football side of the club, over a timeframe of five years or so, there has just been an explosion in progress across the Premier League.
“I’m not saying that Tottenham didn’t improve in that period. But what I can tell you is that when you look at where Tottenham were in many of those areas, compared to where I believe other Premier League clubs are, there was a significant gap. In some areas really quite worryingly so.
“I don’t think that there was what I would call a relentless obsession with football success.
“Our training centre is amazing, one of the best, if not the best in the world. But when you look around, it looks more like a five-star hotel than it does a performance environment. That will change over the summer.
“I think there are many areas where the club hasn’t got the right level of expertise.”
Nobody, myself included, can say with a straight face that Daniel Levy isn’t at least partially culpable for the mess Tottenham Hotspur finds itself in. Even Levy’s most ardent supporters would probably agree that the former chairman “lost his fastball,” to use a baseball analogy, and that he wasn’t as an effective chairman once it became clear that football was transitioning to a modern executive committee style leadership framework. Levy made his share of mistakes and miscues over the past few years, this is undeniable.
But Levy has been gone since September, and there’s only so long that Venkatesham and the Lewises can play the “Levy Card.” Significant mistakes were made on their watch, and there doesn’t seem to be much evidence that they recognize their own culpability for those mistakes. Venkatesham’s focus on the training ground as being “too nice” is particularly weird — is he suggesting that he’s going to scruff up Tottenham’s state of the art new facility? What does he mean by “looks more like a five-star hotel than it does a performance environment?” And why is that the example he chose to illustrate why Spurs are apparently behind their Premier League rivals in terms of structure?
Venkatesham, also, can’t quite bring himself to admit that the sacking of Thomas Frank came far too late, nor that the appointment of Igor Tudor was a mistake.
“Obviously, we were very disappointed when it became clear that we wouldn’t be appointing Roberto on a permanent basis [in February]. We were then in the interim market, which is generally not the broadest. There were a number of reasons why Igor was selected: he had managed in very high-profile and high-pressure environments – we didn’t want somebody that was going to wilt under that pressure.
“He has a history of making an immediate impact. He has managed in big clubs. He has quite a different personality to Thomas and we felt like something different was needed.
“But of course we were really aware he had no Premier League experience. Was it a risk in appointing him? Absolutely.
“It didn’t work out. I think it’s very clear it didn’t work out. And I don’t think that is in question. I don’t think anybody would argue anything else.”
The appointment of Tudor was a disaster, with the Croatian taking only one point from his seven matches in charge, and leaving the club only with the convenient (but true) excuse that his father had just passed away. Notably we have yet to hear Tudor’s side of the story — he’s been completely silent since leaving Spurs — but it’s notable that Venkatesham can’t say that his appointment was a mistake, just that “it didn’t work out.”
In this light, it’s hard to read these quotes and statements and not think that the executive leadership have come to the conclusion that it’s still okay to blame Levy, at least for now. It’s a particularly egregious form of butt-covering.
But it won’t work forever. It can’t, and I suspect the Lewises and Venkatesham know this. Statements and interviews like the above only serve to weasel out of responsibility in the short term, but this is THEIR club now. THEY are the ones making the decisions, and THEY should be the one culpable for what’s happening to the club right now, no matter what Levy did or did not do before his sacking.
Venkatesham goes on to say that he’s aware of the problems at the club on the football side and that the club is taking steps to address them.
“I understand the frustration around supporters. I think Tottenham supporters have been frustrated for some time. This is two 17th-place finishes in a row. It’s clearly not good enough. I think that is rational, normal, sensible, and, is what we would expect from supporters.
“The club had some serious challenges that it needs to address on the football side. We know what those are. We are addressing them. We are fixing them. Those challenges have not disappeared overnight. They built up over many years. I wish I could wave my magic wand and fix them overnight, but that is not possible. It takes some time to fix those issues.
“So I have complete confidence in what we’re doing, how we’re doing it. But supporters are rightly impatient. So I have to weather that storm.”
This statement, to me, is mostly fine. It’s good that he recognizes that club is not currently on the right track. It’s gratifying to know that steps are being taken to address those shortcomings. But again, Venkatesham essentially subtweets Levy with his “built up over many years” comment, suggesting that the root of the issues stem from his perceived lack of leadership rather than anything that has been done since Venkatesham took over as CEO in June.
I don’t like the blame game and I don’t like the implication that the buck has been passed to a strong personality no longer at the club. But ultimately, the proof is in the pudding. Supporters are not stupid. We know what the issues are, and are rightfully demanding comprehensive change to ensure that a season like this one never happens again. It’s encouraging to see that Johan Lange might not have as secure a position as we once thought, and that the club is still actively looking for new people to fill key roles at the club, starting with (co-) Sporting Director.
But the Lewis family and Ventkatesham cannot continue to pin their own shortcomings on the former Chairman. This is their club now. They need to start acting like it. The buck now starts and stops with them, and we supporters are watching closely.
