With Levy out, Tottenham has a chance to finally fulfill our potential

Look at Spurs today. Thanks to Levy – and it really is thanks to him; without him, this simply would not have happened – we have the finest stadium in the country (by a mile) have had Champions League football so often that when we miss out it’s seen as a disaster and have had some of the greatest players of the Premier League, including England’s top goalscorer in Harry Kane. The very fact that he faced such criticism for the fact that we hadn’t won anything for so long was itself a product of how successful Levy was as chairman. He turned a club going backwards into one of the best-run and exciting teams in the league. That he built a stadium costing over £1 billion without killing us financially is a modern financing miracle.

And remember, if it wasn’t for a penalty that wasn’t a penalty at the start of the Champions League final in 2019, we might well have won it.

That’s the upside. But you can take much of that and put a very different, and equally accurate, spin on it. Take that Champions League run. Levy was lucky to almost blunder into appointing Mauricio Pocchetino as manager. He wasn’t first or even second choice. But when he took us to the brink of the title, and to the Champions League final, instead of backing him to refresh an ageing team, Levy took Poch’s obvious exhaustion as a sign that it was all coming to an end, didn’t sign a single player. So we were awful the next season and, as was his wont, Levy sacked Poch – a terrible decision from which we still haven’t really recovered, although I am as sure as one can be so early into a new manager’s reign that Thomas Frank is the right man for the job, at last.

Much criticism has rightly been aimed at Levy’s penchant for firing managers. Sacking 15 managers in 24 years is a very unfunny joke. But for all the praise he is due for the club’s transformation, it is no less fair to point out how he would never go that extra step to turn us from being a top-six team into serious title contenders. Levy was famed as being the best negotiator in the business, a man so difficult to deal with that some clubs point blank refused. But that’s not a sign he was a good negotiator. It’s a sign of how terrible he was. The sign of a good deal is that both sides walk away content. Levy seemed to revel in ‘winning’ deals at the end of the transfer window, which meant that for all the bargains, we lost out on so many players. At the level Spurs should be competing at, players have a price, and if you don’t pay it, you lose out. We lost out.

It seems clear that the new broom at ENIC wants us to press on to the next level and sees that Levy is too cautious to do that. At the end of last season, our wage bill of £222m meant that we had the lowest wage to turnover ratio (42 per cent) in the league. That’s great for the accountants, but dismal as a straitjacket for signing the best players.

I was never one of those who screamed for Levy to go (although I did demand that in the JC when Mourinho was sacked!), but I am pleased he has now gone. We have the potential to put the Gooners in their place and be regular contenders for the title. That will take consistency on the field and investment off it, which Levy only ever managed half-heartedly. Onwards, now – and upwards!