This article is taken from the November 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
I’m sure that at some point in my childhood my parents told me to stop being an ungrateful little so-and-so. I’ve certainly used a fruitier version of those words to my own teenagers when my alternative job as a chauffeur/emergency supplier of funds/homework helper/general servant has been met with a grunt rather than a thank you. Kids, eh? But — as I’m sure is true for all Critic-reading parents — kids are taught and learn to dump that sense of the world owing them. Football fans, on the other hand …
I was struck in September by the overwhelming sense of ingratitude from my fellow Spurs fans when Daniel Levy was booted out from his position as executive chairman of Tottenham Hotspur. When he took over in 2001, with the purchase of the club by his patron Joe Lewis’s ENIC, we were a mid-table team that flirted with relegation. We weren’t so much a sleeping giant as narcoleptic. We didn’t only flirt with relegation; we regularly flirted with bankruptcy.
Under Levy, we went from being a club worth £80 million to today’s valuation of £4 billion and our turnover — a vital statistic under the Premier League’s Profitability and Sustainability Rules (PSR) — has gone from £110 million in 2010 to over £600 million today. We have a £1 billion stadium that is the envy of every other club — which was built on time, on budget and without crippling our finances. We have a training ground so superb that international teams queue up to use it.
That’s all fine, goes the cry, but what about the football? Until last season’s win in the Europa League we had gone 17 years without winning anything. We’re not just a business. We are a football club that exists to win matches.
A club of our wealth, and with our fan base, should be challenging not just for cups but for the League.
Sometimes I wish I supported a team like Brentford, Brighton or Bournemouth (what is it with “B” teams?), who are successful on their own terms but without any of the expectations that clubs like Spurs are dogged with.
How wonderful it must be to be a Crystal Palace fan, when you’ve never won a thing and don’t really expect to. It’s the hope that kills, they say — but then suddenly, joyously, the hopes come true and you find yourselves in the FA Cup Final against Manchester City. A fun day out, you know you can’t expect to win. But you never know, it’s only one game. Then you go a goal up in the first half — can it be happening?
You’re counting down the minutes, then the seconds … and then it’s happened: you’ve won! That’s not how it is for Spurs fans. We know — we know! — we are going to lose. I was in Bilbao in May for the Europa League final. It was unbearable precisely because we knew we should win against a truly rubbish Manchester United team. But we also knew we would lose, because that’s what we do. We always manage to find ludicrous ways to lose. It’s in our DNA. Spursy and all that.
I hadn’t quite realised how much that burden mattered to me until the unthinkable happened and we did actually win, overturning every one of our own — and every-one else’s — preconceptions about Spurs. Even now, half a year after the match, I still find myself sitting back and basking in the glory.
But the reaction to Levy’s departure showed how that dog-in-the-manger outlook still persists. Tottenham are winners. That’s a fact. We won the Europa League. And in that context, our overall record under Levy’s tenure — as a stellar business and on the pitch — looks, objectively, rather better than it would have done if we had lost yet another final.
We have gone from fighting relegation to challenging for Champions League spots, then to qualifying for it so regularly that when we fail to do so it’s seen as a disaster. In 2019 we were one match and one dodgy penalty from winning the Champions League. And under Levy we finished second in the Premier League in 2016-17 and reached 15 semi-finals and six finals.
But I don’t know any Spurs fan who looks at it like that — who thinks how lucky we have been to have been able to watch legends such as Harry Kane, Son Heung-Min, Ledley King, Gareth Bale and Luka Modric and to support a team which regularly competes at the top of the table. Instead, we moan. All the time.
As I write, for example, we are third in the Premier League. All things considered that’s quite a start, given we lost 22 games last season and finished 17th, and have a new manager who has barely been with us for more than a few weeks. But do we walk around smiling about it? Nope. We talk about how poor our attack is, why doesn’t Thomas Frank know what his best team is, why did we lose to Bournemouth and draw with Wolves?
That’s in part a result of our storied history and the expectations every Spurs fan has that the team shouldn’t just win but should win with style. But it’s also because, whilst as adults we know not to be such ungrateful so-and-sos, as Spurs fans, we know no such thing.
