Financial expert claims Levy is responsible for Spurs’ lack of silverware

Football finance expert Kieran Maguire believes Daniel Levy is responsible for Tottenham Hotspur’s failure to get over the line and win silverware since the chairman did not relax the club’s tight transfer and wage spending at the right time.

Levy recently completed two decades as chairman of Spurs and there is no denying that the club has progressed considerably in that time both on and off the field.

From being mired in mid-table mediocrity when ENIC took over the majority stake at the club from Alan Sugar, Tottenham have now established themselves as one of the Premier League’s ‘big six’ and boast of one of the highest revenues in European Football.

While there has been a massive improvement on the pitch as well, with the North Londoners now regularly competing at the top end of the league, the one black mark over Levy’s reign has been the lack of silverware.

Although the Lilywhites have come close to winning the biggest trophies in the game over the past five years, the club only have a solitary League Cup to show for their achievements in the last two decades.

Maguire, who has previously been complimentary of the prudent way in which Levy runs Spurs, has now suggested that the 59-year-old could have loosened the purse strings at the right time.

Regarding Tottenham’s lack of trophies during Levy’s time at the club, Maguire told Football Insider: “He has a limited impact on events on the pitch but ultimately it is his decision in terms of the wage budget and the transfer budget.

“I think that’s the thing that frustrates Spurs fans more than anything else, that they’ve been there or thereabouts.

“But they might be thinking if only he’d been slightly more relaxed in terms of signing one or two more players, that could have converted 2nd and 3rd place finishes into 1sts. It could have converted cup progress into cup victories.”

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There is no doubt that we failed to strengthen sufficiently in a few windows which  potentially prevented us from taking that final step. The window where we brought Nelson and Saha in January 2011 and the time when we missed out on Zaha in 2016 and got Sissoko instead, particularly stand out.

However, what Levy has accomplished is to get us generating the kind of revenue (owing to the new stadium and commercial growth) that allows us to compete with some of the biggest clubs in Europe for the next few decades. Unfortunately, the pandemic struck at the worst possible time for Spurs, just as Levy was beginning to loosen the purse strings to snap up the likes of Ndombele, Lo Celso (and nearly Dybala).

Even in terms of the wages we pay, there has been a steady increase without the club ever resorting to shattering their wage structure like Arsenal have with the likes of Ozil and now Aubameyang. In fact, our relatively modest wage bill is what has been our saving grace in the current financial climate and why the likes of Arsenal, Barcelona and Real Madrid are in a bigger mess.

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