An Empty House
Daniel Levy has built the shiniest, yet most soulless, edition of Tottenham Hotspur yet
In the 1990s in the United States, the economy boomed. Wall Street was posting major gains, wages were doing well, and the housing market kept going up, up, up. Amidst all this continued the phenomenon of “white flight” from urban centers. In their new found suburban digs, the newly minted middle class were building massive houses. 2500-3000 square feet, the bigger the better. And who could blame them? Life was good and what better way to show off the new status they’d earned.
A problem presented itself though: how do you furnish and decorate for a space that size? Unless theirs was a family of seven or eight, there was no need for a home that big. My mom worked for a realtor during those days and sometimes told us of appraisers that would come back from these modern day manors and shake their head. Often two or three of the rooms were simply left bare or sparsely decorated due to lack of funds, vision, or practical reason to improve it.
Without analyzing every step Daniel Levy has made in the last five years, this is what he’s left us with: A valuable, shining brand—complete with a stadium and training grounds that look like palaces—but upon further inspection, lacks the vision to make everything flow together.
The last few weeks have made it clear Daniel Levy and the Tottenham Hotspur board thought building the house was the endgame, but along the way forgot that once everything is built, life continues. And life is messy. Until we find a coherent director of football who can manage the mess by synthesizing an academy (development and recruitment), analytics team (video, scouting, raw data), first team player recruitment strategy, and coach into something we can recognize as a Club, we will be relying on our wealth and small group of star players to keep us competitive in hopes that this year, this time, fortune will smile upon us.
If seeking fourth place by any means necessary is the goal, that bet has worked. If seeking titles and trophies is, it has not. If seeking a cohesive Club that has a clear trajectory from the academy to the board room to the terraces, it has not. And that’s a problem.
And to bring the metaphor back, the nicest decoration in the house, Harry Kane, is not a permanent fixture. Either impatience or time will eventually bring his playing career at Spurs to an end. And what are we betting on then?
It’s time to remodel Tottenham Hotspur, from the inside out, so we’re betting on a process we can believe in, not simply dumb luck. COYS