Alongside men’s head coach Ange Postecoglou, new captain Son Heung-min and their counterparts on the women’s team, Tottenham chairman Daniel Levy held a 90-minute Q&A session for supporters at the club’s stadium on Tuesday.
Here are some of the key talking points that were discussed.
Transfer talk: a possible Kane reunion
The marquee news from the club’s first fan forum in six years was that Spurs reportedly have a buy-back clause for former star striker and club captain Harry Kane, who left north London to join Bayern Munich this summer after a 19-year association with Tottenham.
The 30-year-old England captain insisted his August exit was “not goodbye”, and, when pressed by host Nihal Arthanayake, Levy’s answer to a fan’s question of whether such a buy-back clause with the German giants was “of course”. It will have no doubt fuelled Spurs fans’ hopes of a potential reunion with the club’s record goalscorer in the future.
However, Levy did not elaborate on the details or figures around what that return option could look like.
Describing the ending of the summer window as “stressful”, Levy ended his remarks with some advice to new signing James Maddison, who has shone for Spurs so far this season with two goals and two assists.
“James [Maddison] needs to learn that he can’t come to the training ground in a red car,” the Tottenham chief joked. “I’ve told him. He’ll learn.”
Ange ‘a breath of fresh air’ after manager roulette
“It feels like a lifetime ago now,” Levy said of his “very easy” decision to appointment ex-Celtic manager Postecoglou in June.
“Ange, I would say, is just a normal bloke and it was wonderful to be able to have a conversation with him where we could talk about anything and he was very direct and honest,” the Spurs chairman continued.
“I like someone who just tells me as it is, no one that plays games, no one that says one thing to me and then one thing to someone else.”
His comment that Tottenham “needed to go back to its roots” was greeted with applause, and Levy added that despite pressure to bring in a big-name new boss, he preferred a team player who understood the club’s DNA, would play attacking football and give chances to young players and “believes in the academy”.
“Ange, I have to say, is a breath of fresh air” was another line met with cheers from the club’s fans in attendance.
“It’s simple,” Levy added, “we’ve got our Tottenham back.”
Lessons learnt from previous bosses
“You have to learn from your mistakes” was the answer when Levy was asked what he had learnt from Spurs’ two previous managers, Nuno Espirito Santo and Antonio Conte.
“I want to win as much as everybody else, but the frustration of not winning and the pressure from, maybe some players and from a large element of the fanbase that we need to win, we need to spend money, we need to have a big manager, we need to have a big name – it affected me,” he said.
Levy spoke of the “very good times” when Spurs “almost won” the Champions League with Mauricio Pochettino, before a change in strategy led the club to look for a “trophy manager” after the now-Chelsea head coach was sacked in 2019.
Jose Mourinho – who was sacked after 17 months, just days before Tottenham’s loss to Manchester City in the 2021 League Cup final – was the first man Tottenham turned to after the Argentine’s exit, before a four-month stint by former Wolves boss Nuno was followed by Conte’s contentious reign.
“We did it twice and look you have to learn from your mistakes” Levy said. “They’re great managers but maybe not for this club.
“For what we want, we want to play in a certain way and if that means it has to take a little bit longer to win maybe it’s the right thing for us. That’s why bringing Ange in was, from my point of view, the right decision.”
Stadium naming rights and ticket prices
According to Levy, additional, unanticipated costs faced by Tottenham – who had opened their brand-new Tottenham Hotspur Stadium about a year prior to the start of the worldwide Covid pandemic – came out to around £200m.
With the “complicated” process of securing a naming rights deal for their new ground also interrupted by the pandemic, Levy conceded that “other sources of income” could have prevented the recent rise in matchday ticket prices at Spurs.
“Ticket pricing is an area I know everyone is sensitive to and so are we,” he said. “We haven’t put ticket prices up until recently, despite the fact that they’ve been fixed for over four years.
“We’re all facing increased costs, we’ve absorbed as much as we can, but if we had other sources of income maybe we wouldn’t have had to do it.”
However, the Spurs chairman added: “We want to find the right sponsor, in the right sector, at the right price and in the meantime, unless we get that, we won’t put a name on the stadium. We’d rather just have Tottenham Hotspur.”
Levy promised a general “long-term strategy paper on ticketing” had been agreed upon by the club’s Fan Advisory Board, to look at areas such as pricing and access.
“We’re going to do a complete review and look at how we can improve things,” he said.
“We’re all very conscious of the cost of coming to a football game. As I said before, we are going to go through a complete review of all of our ticketing policies, but we’re in the real world and the costs of operating a football club have gone up significantly.”
European Super League
Quizzed on whether he would consider taking part in some iteration of the previously proposed European Super League, Levy said he remained open to the possibility – but that doing so would not mean an exit from the Premier League.
“Firstly, under the new rules with the Premier League, we can’t consider leaving the Premier League without their consent and the FA’s consent,” Levy said.
“All I would say to you is that we always act in the best interests of this club and I stand by the decision that we made, that we were prepared to have a conversation regarding the European Super League.”
“It was not leaving the Premier League, it was about forming a new European league that would have continued at the same time as the Premier League.
“We felt that it was a disaster for a lot of reasons but I stand by my decision that I was acting in the best interests of the club.”
Tottenham’s results this season
- 2-2 draw vs Brentford
- 2-0 win vs Manchester United
- 2-0 win vs Bournemouth
- 5-2 win vs Burnley
- 2-1 win vs Sheffield United
After four consecutive wins and an unbeaten to start to the 2023-24 Premier League season under Postecoglou, Spurs’ next challenge is a north London derby showdown with Arsenal on Sunday, 24 September, followed by a visit from Liverpool at the end of the month.
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