Andre Villas-Boas has blasted Daniel Levy’s leadership style and opened up on the issues he had with the Tottenham hierarchy during his time at the club.
Villas-Boas’ Tottenham showed plenty of promise in the Portuguese coach’s first year in charge after he replaced Harry Redknapp in the summer of 2012.
Although Spurs just missed out on a top-four finish in the 2012/13 season, they had accumulated what was then a club-record points tally of 72 in the Premier League.
However, the North Londoners saw Gareth Bale depart to Real Madrid in 2013 and the squad went through a significant overhaul that summer.
The team did not get off to the best of starts to the 2013/14 season and Villas-Boas was sacked midway into the campaign, with Tim Sherwood being handed the reins until the summer.
Villas-Boas has now admitted that there were issues between him and Levy even before the start of the 2013/14 campaign.
He said on the Keys & Gray Show on beIN SPORTS (as relayed by Football.London): “Tottenham in the first year was very good.
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“It was not easy with Daniel. I’m not the simplest of guys to work with but we had our ups and downs.
“We had a lot of fun in that first season and we reached the end of that season and I was expecting to renew with Tottenham after having refused to go to Paris Saint-Germain.
“But what I think is that Daniel was willing to sell me to Paris Saint-Germain because my clause was £50million rather than renewing me. So we started the second year in bad animosity.
“Either way, we were very, very close to the top, we had more points when I reached an agreement to leave Tottenham than we had the season when we beat the record of points.
“But the environment was not there anymore, the connection with me and Daniel and Franco Baldini, so it was also time to go.”
The former Tottenham head coach accused Levy of running the club like a business rather than prioritising results on the pitch.
When asked about the difficulty of working under the Spurs chairman’s leadership, Villas-Boas responded: “It all has to do with this extravagant leadership to take control of the clubs.
“And we saw in the Super League, with the failure of the Super League, the impact of these extravagant ideas.
“Basically, it’s people who are business people who want to set up their business without any respect for what is around, which is emotions and love. As surprising as the foundation of the Super League is, it’s much more astonishing the fact they have quit so soon.
“They even hadn’t the balls to hold up the challenge to it, so this was a surprise. But it is what it is, extravagant leadership at clubs that keeps on happening.”
Spurs Web Opinion
I had a soft spot for Villas-Boas as I always liked him as a person. However, he absolutely deserved to be sacked when he was as we were getting thrashed by the likes of Liverpool and City at the time.
Some of the football that was served up during the Portuguese coach’s time in charge of the club was comparable to the worst displays we saw in the Mourinho reign.
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