Tottenham car crash is Daniel Levy’s fault as managers and players backfire

Answering questions in the Cambridge Union debating chamber last month, Daniel Levy was told that Tottenham’s decline began with the book published by Mauricio Pochettino in late 2017.

It was called Brave new world and subtitled Inside Pochettino’s Spurs, which intertwined details from the previous campaign, when he finished second to Antonio Conte’s Chelsea, with the Argentine’s personal journey from Murphy in Santa Fe to North London.

Levy didn’t admit it was the source of all ills, but he didn’t seem firmly behind the project. “It was his choice to do it,” he said. “Some people said it was a good thing, some people said it was a bad thing. It was his choice and we obviously didn’t stop him.’

Perhaps this was the moment when Pochettino took his eyes off the ball. Revealing secrets while in situ rarely works out well, as it usually comes with a hint of belief in your own hype and will certainly affect the elusive balance that managers try to establish for years.

Although the same can be said for others. Perhaps Levy swallowed his own hype after delivering the fantastic Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, overhauling Arsenal to bring in Champions League football, flirting with investors in the US and inviting Amazon backstage for a documentary series.

Some players believed it too. Conte, who labeled them as “selfish” and incapable of performing well under pressure, would certainly say so.

What Spurs had perfectly matched for a few years was lost and allowed to slip away.

The 2019 Champions League final is deceptive. In retrospect, the team was already a fading force and has been on a steady decline ever since.

Sunday’s 6-1 capitulation in Newcastle is just the latest manifestation, albeit an embarrassing extreme in a delicate time when Levy seems to have resisted the temptation to bring back Pochettino, arguably the only managerial candidate capable of winning a angry fanbase who is sure to get angrier when he turns up at Chelsea and starts to knock their pathetic mess back into shape.

All this leaves Levy firmly under the pump. He may take credit for the good things he’s accomplished in 23 years at the helm, but with that comes the blame for this succession of bad management appointments, bad football strategy decisions and poor recruiting that have stalled progress.

The 2016/17 team that finished second in the Premier League with 86 points, losing just four games out of 38, had a mix of experience and homegrown talent.

Millions have since been wasted on overvalued players, some of whom were jettisoned almost as soon as they arrived.

Tanguy Ndombele, Giovani Lo Celso, Bryan Gil and Sergio Reguilon, who cost around £150 million, are all on loan and have little prospect of a return.

Last summer they spent £20 million on Djed Spence, a Middlesbrough full-back who Conte neither wanted nor used. In January, he sent him on loan to Rennes and secured a £45 million deal for Pedro Porro, a Sporting full-back who appears unable to defend.

You can’t get them all right, but who is driving this hiring flow? Different types of chief scouts and sports directors? The head coaches and managers? Favorite agents? Do they take turns? You pick one, then I pick one, because sometimes it seems like they would. Whoever it is, the responsibility lies with Levy.

It’s his club and he should know by now what he means when he talks about Tottenham’s DNA.

You would think he envisions attractive football with energetic players from the academy system. That’s the best thing about Tottenham.

However, his last three appointments, Jose Mourinho, Nuno Espirito Santo and Conte, make it seem as if he has confused these principles with a desperate desire for immediate success, whether in the form of Champions League football or a domestic trophy.

Or maybe they had to convince Harry Kane, the last jewel in the crown, that Tottenham can match his ambition.

Mourinho reached the League Cup final in 2021, but was sacked days before. Conte led them back to the Champions League and might have done it again had this not been such a difficult season for him personally.

But the past four years have mostly served to remind Tottenham fans that they prefer to play football with flair.

If they’re not going to win anything, and it’s going to be tough when almost everything is won by Manchester City, they might as well have fun trying.

This should change Levy on his next appointment. His margin of error is gone if he wants Pochettino to go to Chelsea as this post-Conte period unfolds in the same listless fashion as the post-Mourinho period.

In 2021, Ryan Mason took interim control and results were hot and cold as the search for the next manager meandered through a series of rejections and came back to Nuno, considered and then sacked at the start of the process.

With 62 points, Spurs finished seventh, qualified for the Europa Conference League and fans turned against Levy in protest.

The main argument for keeping Conte’s trusted assistant Cristian Stellini was to spare Mason, highly regarded within the club, the disgrace of a repeat.

There were 10 games left when Conte departed after his astonishing outburst at Southampton and they picked up just four points from four games under Stellini before he was sacked on Monday.

The Italian’s most notable change was to give players the occasional day off. Training and other routines remained identical, no real surprise from a coach so closely associated with Conte operating with the same players.

The scope for drastic tactical changes is limited, but at Newcastle, perhaps against his better judgement, he abandoned the familiar 3-4-3 form in favor of a back-four, conceded five goals within 21 minutes and bounced back .

The problems on Tyneside were not limited to the formation. Porro looks unequipped to play at right-back in a four, but his loan will become a five-year contract in the summer.

It’s one of many problems that the man Stellini replaces must solve quickly.

The mistakes that defined the six years since Tottenham’s high watermark of the Levy era, in 2017, are still being made and for whatever reason Pochettino is not about to be invited back to recreate the magic.

So much for Tottenham’s brave new world.