Spurs fans get it. And yet I’ve read two dozen articles and blog posts about Ramos’s job security in the 24 hours since Tottenham’s loss to Stoke, and only a couple of them have paid any attention to Levy. A few more have dropped in a line or two about Comolli, while a good half actually skipped over the part where they might have mentioned either man’s name, instead asking only whether “Spurs” should fire Juande Ramos, as though a club were a concept with agency. So at the risk of sounding like 80% of all political bloggers: why doesn’t the media get it? Why is it so hard to see that the manager isn’t the whole story?
Read More: Daniel Levy, Juande Ramos, Tottenham
by Brian Phillips · October 20, 2008
At the risk of repeating myself, they don’t get it because Levy has worked very hard for the last ten years to construct a protective media cocoon around himself that is infinitely more effective than Tottenham’s defence.
I think we’ve “spoken” about this before, but the sheer lazyness of the British football press and their willingness to disseminate and perpetuate pre-packaged “truths” fed to them by publicists simply cannot be underestimated.
Case in point: Levy’s allowing his “support” for Ramos to filter down into the papers this morning. Beyond all the cliches about the “dreaded vote of confidence”, Levy is brilliant at setting up these little tests for managers through declarations of his confidence in them.
Whenever he makes it known that he “absolutely believes X is the man to turn the team around”, what he’s really doing is establishing the expectation that X will win the next game. If X wins it, then Levy looks like a cool head who knows his business; if X loses it, then Levy looks disappointed rather than culpable. Then the inevitable move to replace the manager seems like something he’s been forced to by the manager’s incompetence rather than by any fault of his own.
This dynamic is obviously not unique to Tottenham, but it stands out more there because Levy is so much better at manipulating the press than, say, Mike Ashley, without being particularly skilled at putting together a team.