Tottenham CEO Vinai Venkatesham has shed light on what has held back the club over recent years and the efforts underway to put things right.
After Spurs secured Premier League survival on the final day of the season, we have heard a lot from the club’s leadership about their plans moving forward.
Tottenham’s non-executive chairman, Peter Charrington, has insisted that the club’s owners are committed to backing Roberto De Zerbi in the transfer market and competing for major honours.
According to reports, Spurs’ performance director, Dan Lewindon, is leading an internal investigation into all aspects of the club to find out why they have fallen short over the last few years.
Vinai Venkatesham claims Tottenham were in ‘a much worse state’ than he thought
Venkatesham has admitted that the side’s struggles this season have been embarrassing for all involved, conceding that a club of Spurs’ stature should never have been in a relegation fight.
However, he also revealed that he found things at Tottenham to be in much worse shape than he thought when he arrived around a year ago, claiming that the Lilywhites have fallen well short of other Premier League clubs in key areas.
Speaking to the club’s official channel, the Spurs CEO said: “Well, I think to start with, I just wanted to just be obviously completely clear that the season has been completely unacceptable. The men’s first team should never, ever be involved in a relegation battle. It is just so far beneath the standards that this football club has. And I know for our supporters, it has been impossibly difficult. It has been exhausting. It has been painful. It’s just been embarrassing.
“It’s just not where this club can ever, ever be again. So I just wanted to say thank you, first of all, for our supporters for sticking with the team all the way through to the end of the season. It has been critically important, but home and away, the team have really felt that support and felt it really genuinely.
“I know the club has grown really significantly over the last decade, but I need to say it as I saw it. I think it’s fair to say that the club was in a much worse state when you’re able to look at it from the inside than I thought when I looked at it from the outside. So it was going to be a much bigger challenge than I thought it would be.
“None of this is meant to be a criticism, by the way, of anyone or anything. I want to be clear on that. Some areas of strength on the commercial side, the stadium operations, very important because they drive the revenue to invest in the team, and in today’s world of football, importantly, the financial fair play headroom.
“But on the football side, a big gap between where we were and where we should be, and what has happened in football over the last five years is there’s been an unbelievable acceleration of quality across all Premier League clubs and football operations, big, small or medium and Tottenham has been left behind in far too many of those areas.
Venkatesham admits Spurs reset will take time
The Tottenham chief revealed that work is already underway to fundamentally reset the way the club operates.
However, he conceded that it will not be an immediate fix for the club, and the breadth of changes needed requires time to implement.
Venkatesham added: “We have been doing a really, really big reset of the club from September to fix that, because this is not going to be fixed by a tweak here, a player here, a member of staff here, an investment here. It needs a fundamental rebaselining, a complete reset, which is going to take time to deliver.
“These challenges, the reason why we’re in this situation, have developed over many years and I wish I could just click my fingers in September and go from where we were to where we want to be. But it’s just not realistic.
“It’s going to take some time to get back to where we need to be. We are in the process of delivering this reset, and we need to complete this reset to get the club to where it wants to be. It might not be the answer that everybody wants. It might be that everybody wants and feels that we should have to fix all of this straight away, but it’s just not the reality of the situation.”