You could be forgiven for thinking otherwise, given the media's fixation on what his next move will be during the ongoing Spurs meltdown, but Daniel Levy is merely a director and minority shareholder, and not the owner, of English National Investment Company plc, the holding company that controls 82% of Tottenham Hotspur. ENIC is in turn controlled by Tavistock Group, which is the private investment group of the billionaire Joe Lewis, who is, if such a person exists, the actual owner of Tottenham Hotspur.
Joe Lewis spent much of last year laying out enormous cash payments for huge chunks of Bear Stearns, spending somewhere in the vicinity of a billion dollars for a 10% stake in the doomed investment bank just a few months before its collapse. As a result, he has lost what much be a terrifying fraction of his net worth in the last half-year, and probably has very little time to worry about any part of Tottenham Hotspur except its value in a potential sale.
However, if it is true that the questions surrounding the job of Spurs manager Juande Ramos are going to grow louder following Tottenham's astonishing collapse at Stoke City today—a 2-1 loss in which they were shown two straight red cards and saw Corluka taken away in an ambulance—then it is worth asking whether, if Ramos was such a bad choice to manage Spurs, any part of the responsibility for that choice might reside with the man who made it. The media are acting as though Levy is the final judge and executioner for everything related to Tottenham, but Levy is effectively an employee who made the decision to use the power delegated to him to bring Ramos to the club. And after the publicly humiliating way in which he handled the firing of Martin Jol (whose Hamburg team, incidentally, are now second in the Bundesliga), you would think a great part of his professional reputation would now be bound up in Ramos's success or failure.
I'm not saying Ramos should be fired, or Levy either. I don't expect Tottenham to be relegated this year, and it's not surprising that a team with as much off-season turnover as Spurs would struggle during the early part of the season. (It is surprising to see them struggle this much.) But this is a case where the simplifying habit of assigning all credit and blame to the manager simply doesn't make sense. If you're going to talk about whether Levy should replace Juande Ramos, you have to talk about whether Joe Lewis should replace Daniel Levy. He put this puzzle together, and has been shielded from criticism by the complexity of Tottenham's corporate structure for too long.
ENIC International, a company incorporated in the Commonwealth of the Bahamas, is ultimately
owned by the family interests of Joseph Lewis as to 70.6 per cent. and the family interests of Daniel
Levy as to 29.4 per cent. ENIC International was incorporated on 29 December 2000 and has never
traded. Its sole function is as a holding company of ENIC and to hold shares in Tottenham Hotspur.
ENIC International holds 82% of the fully diluted share capital of THFC PLC thus Lewis owns 57.89% of THFC PLC and Levy owns 24.1% of THFC PLC.
Levy's funding of the purchase of the shares came from his own money.
Thanks for the percentages, Bored—I added a line in the first paragraph to note Levy's minority stake in ENIC—but I'm not sure what your point is.
Having a minority stake in a holding company does not make you the owner of the club, even if you bought it with your own money. If Joe Lewis doesn't want Daniel Levy running Tottenham, he will no longer run Tottenham, simple as that.
Exhibit Z in the media attitude I'm talking about:
"Should Daniel Levy, the Tottenham chairman, act now before it is too late?"
Yes, let's hope he rushes in and saves Spurs fans from this situation he played absolutely no part in creating.
I've been arguing that both Levy and Comolli should have gone a while back, Brian, but also think you're overstating your case a bit here.
At least among Spurs supporters and financially literate followers of the British game, it is very well known that ENIC/Lewis control the club, but it is also equally the case that Levy is both a significant minority shareholder in ENIC and has been the public face of the business side of Tottenham for close to a decade now.
To say that he "played absolutely no part in creating" the situation is simply not true. Levy has been the most senior executive at Tottenham throughout the period, and the one who has always been identified as the senior decision-maker. What is true is that Lewis could have theoretically stopped him at an earlier point in his reign of error, but has chosen not to act for reasons best left to the "shadowy Bermuda-based businessman"'s* therapist.
There is also the unanswered question of whether Lewis and Levy are bound by a shareholders' agreement that gives the minority investor certain rights of veto/protection. That would not be by any means unprecedented, but we simply don't know if such an agreement exists.
One more thing, HSV are now top of the Bundesliga. Big Martin Jol is following in the footsteps of that other N17 "failure", Christian Gross (who has won 4 titles (and 8 trophies) at FC Basel since being cashiered by Lewis/ENIC/Levy).
* an epithet as ubiquitous in British journalism as "rosy fingered" is in Homer's description of Dawn.
I was (obviously, I think) being sarcastic with the line about Levy playing no part in creating this situation.
To be completely plain, I'm accusing Levy of having played a larger part in creating the situation than any other person, and yet continually evading blame for it by hiding behind subordinates such as Jol, Comolli, and Ramos.
As everyone knows or should know, Levy dragged the club's reputation through the mud last year in order to fire a popular and successful manager and replace him with Ramos, who was presumably "his man". I think he went far enough out on a limb in doing so to stake his reputation on Ramos's success or failure.
And yet now that Ramos is under pressure, the overwhelming question in the press is simply whether Levy should fire Ramos and/or Comolli—as if he himself has had nothing to do with what's happened.
In my opinion, he's been able to avoid his share of criticism first by being very skillful at manipulating the entrenched media narrative of managerial responsibility (setting up "tests", issuing statements about board expectations, etc.), and second because—as this thread shows—Tottenham's corporate structure is so murky that it's difficult to say where responsibility starts and stops.
Thus, I want to keep shining a light on this mess by focusing on Levy's job performance as the situation at Spurs develops. This is partly because I think more attention needs to be paid to his role, but it's also partly because I'd like to see more pressure placed on Joe Lewis to answer for the way he's running his club. And pointing out that there's a power above Levy at Tottenham is the best way I can think of to turn the camera toward the Bahamian shadows.
That's a very interesting thought about Levy's potential power under a shareholders' agreement. Since it's only conjectural at this point, though, I'm going to go on under the assumption that Joe Lewis is the ultimate power at Tottenham. Anyone who knows more about this should feel free to email me at tips@runofplay.com. I'd like to accumulate all the details I can.
Ah, the process of having meetings in four countries over two days appears to have disabled my sarcasm detector.
As it happens, I was making essentially the same argument about Levy in London last week, adding the suggestion that Levy's media and social connections in London may have something to do with his apparent Teflon coating.
Some of the people I was speaking with (who know significantly more about that world than I do) seemed to think that was spot on.
The Tottenham Supporters' Trust Annual General Meeting is this week, and it will be quite interesting to see just how this plays out.