No matter the circumstances, every club has a fall guy, and few are as well-known as Daniel Levy. No matter the affiliation, every fan seemed to have an opinion of the Tottenham Hotspur chairman, who left the role on Thursday after 24 years at the helm, and truthfully, the review was rarely a glowing one. For many of those 24 years, Levy was the face of what Spurs had not achieved – one EFL Cup, a UEFA Europa League title, and one trip to the UEFA Champions League final in two decades feel like pretty paltry returns, depending on who you ask. As Levy exits Tottenham, though, he leaves behind a complex legacy, one complicated by the fact that there was actually a lot that went right during his stint at the club.
Levy, the longest-serving club chairman in the Premier League, might primarily be remembered for his longevity, the type of staying power that made his exit a genuine shock. His lengthy spell in charge of Spurs, though, is as clear a snapshot of any of the club’s unexpected journey over the last two decades.
Long before Spurs’ trophy cabinet was a common topic of social media discussion, Levy took over as the club’s executive chairman in February 2001 after buying British business magnate Alan Sugar’s 27% stake in the club. Talk of trophies was aspirational, to put it mildly, at the time Levy took charge – Tottenham may have been one of the “big five” clubs that facilitated the breakaway from the Football League to create the Premier League, but prestige did not exactly follow for the North London club. They had not finished higher than seventh since the Premier League’s inaugural season in 1992-93, at times closer to the relegation zone with a 15th-place finish the following season than the title chase.
Success was not instant, but within a few years, Spurs’ upward trajectory became clear for all to see. Tottenham managed a fifth-place finish in the 2005-06 season thanks in part to a career-best 16-goal campaign from Robbie Keane, even if things unraveled with a case of food poisoning that impacted the team ahead of a crucial game against West Ham United with fourth place on the line. Their participation in the UEFA Cup (now known as the Europa League) the following season, though, is where Levy’s crowning achievement lies – Spurs played in European competition in 18 of the last 20 seasons, a streak that was previously unfamiliar to the team.
It was a marker of Tottenham’s consistency under Levy, the club becoming increasingly skilled at lining up talented players like Dimitar Berbatov and Gareth Bale. Each of them may have departed the club for greater shots at silverware, though their new clubs sent sizable transfer fees in exchange. Levy’s Spurs have since been stuck in the purgatory of being a cuspy club, one that feels like a regular dark horse contender for silverware but is consistently reminded of its second-tier status in the sport’s food chain. That does not mean Levy’s most recognizable strategy was not an effective one – for the majority, sports are not actually an exercise in winning titles, since the task of breaking into the elites is easier said than done. In soccer terms, most clubs are “selling clubs,” and there is an argument to be made that Levy’s Spurs were the cream of the crop. Even as the likes of Luka Modric and Kyle Walker left, Tottenham recruited well enough that maintaining their spot in European competition was almost a given. They may have lucked out on academy product Harry Kane, but players like Son Heung-min, Toby Alderweireld and Christian Eriksen left their own mark, especially so as staples of Mauricio Pochettino’s 2018-19 team that went all the way to the Champions League final.
Levy’s most visible legacy, though, will actually be the 62,000-seater Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. The venue perfectly encapsulates Spurs’ rise, the club now successful enough to warrant a state-of-the-art stadium that regularly brings in revenue from NFL games and concerts in its secondary responsibilities. By the time the new stadium opened in 2019, a rarely-seen trajectory was complete – Spurs had climbed out of midtable mediocrity to become one of the sport’s most recognizable clubs, all without the cash injection of a nation state or a businessperson with remarkably deep pockets. Levy managed that incredible feat without a blueprint to follow and during a period where big money was flooding the sport, at times lifting Spurs’ main competitors to unprecedented heights.
In effect, Levy built a club that was too big for one person to run.
If there was clamor that Spurs’ balance sheet looked too nice before the run to the Champions League final, the noise reached a fever pitch after the fact. Tottenham’s squad has almost paled in comparison to Pochettino’s version of the team, which finished in the Premier League’s top three for three of the five full seasons he was at the helm. Contrary to popular belief, that is not actually down to Levy’s lack of interest in spending on new signings – Tottenham have not turned a profit in the transfer market in the last five years, running a net spend deficit of around $760 million in the last five years, the fourth-highest in the league. The top eight players on the list of their record signings joined the club after the run to the Champions League final, including new chart-topper Xavi Simons.
How well the club has spent on new signings, though, is an entirely different story. Clubs can no longer function as a one-person operation, let alone the richest and most successful ones. The demands of building the stadium may have kept Levy away from the transfer market to the point that Spurs signed no players in the summer of 2018, but he was not the only one pulling the strings at Spurs in his final days at the club. That said, it took too long for a modern structure to take place. Sporting directors have come and gone but held varying levels of influence along the way, things only seeming to take a shift with the 2021 hire of Fabio Paratici and the 2023 recruitment of Johan Lange, who took the role after Paratici received a 30-month ban for an accounting scandal during his time at Juventus. It means Spurs are still playing catch-up with clubs like Liverpool and Manchester City, who have had robust sporting departments for several years, and will not be able to keep pace until they improve their player recruitment strategy.
It was not the only suspect decision Levy made in his final years at the club, though he is sadly far from the only one in this category. Tottenham are one of several English clubs who have refused to invest further in the women’s game, despite the fact that the Lionesses’ back-to-back European Championships have fueled an undeniable rise in popularity for the sport. Barcelona‘s trajectory from becoming a professional team in 2015 to becoming the UEFA Women’s Champions League winners in 2021 should be a signal to Europe’s power players that breaking into the upper echelons of the women’s game is more than feasible. There may be signs of optimism for Spurs’ women’s team, though – new CEO Vinai Venkatesham was an advocate for Arsenal‘s women’s team during his time at the club, the fruits of that labor paying off with their 2025 UWCL triumph.
Any fair criticism of Levy is rooted in the fact that the job of running Tottenham was too big for one person, several important tasks falling to the wayside in his final years at the club. It means his reported removal by Spurs’ majority shareholders was perhaps a deserved one, if a bold one, because Levy felt like a permanent fixture at the club. It may be no consultation to him at this juncture, but his failures are actually a sign of a job well done. Levy is perhaps the only executive of his type in the sport to have single-handedly transformed a club without a blank check from ownership, which is perhaps the most impossible of tasks in a new age of commercialization in the sport.
