Who Is In Charge of Tottenham Hotspur?

We know our manager. Do we know our executives?

Niccoló Machiavelli, portrait by Santi di Tito, c. 1550-1600

A clever scene in the HBO series Silicon Valley, a satire of the tech industry, features a group of characters waxing sentimental in the humble garage of a tech mogul’s childhood home, a ‘where it all began’ moment. But then the camera zooms out to reveal that the humble garage has been removed as a collectible from the family home and sits within a massive hangar attached to the tech mogul’s gigantic mansion. The garage turns out to be just a quaint artifact in the grander scheme of industry.

The scene works satirically by misdirection. We’re given a visual impression of a story, a boy from humble beginnings starting a successful tech company out of his garage. Then we get an abrupt context shift as the camera zooms out: the warmth and charm of the original garage and the story of humble beginnings are just cover for the cold, impersonal reality of the hangar, the mansion, and the indifference of the tech mogul to the world of regular people with regular garages.

The Premier League is like this. For all the feel-good stories and the magical moments we all enjoy in the chaotic sport that Ange Postecoglou affectionately calls ‘our game,’ the Premier League is a massive hangar attached to a gigantic mansion, a global industry that generates over €7 billion a year.

Statista Big Five Soccer Leagues in Europe, Revenue

Attached to the massive industry that is the Premier League is a para-industry, the football media. Now, I know, as someone who does part-time work in journalism and media, that journalists generally don’t like being referred to as ‘the media,’ as if a monolithic group. And they’re right to think that way. So when I discuss the football media here, I’m not trying to portray it negatively, conspiratorially, or monolithically; I have a ton of respect for journalists.

Rather, I’m referring to an apparatus that produces not only reporting, but also narratives about the game, the league, the clubs, the managers, the players, and the fans.

One of the ways the Premier League and its constituent clubs have taken to strategically managing football narratives is by elevating the manager to the role of major celebrity and primary spokesperson for the club. The modern Premier League manager is highly visible and highly compensated. Pep Guardiola earns more than £25 million a year. The majority of Premier League managers earn more than £5 million a year.

In this prominent role, the celebrity manager is also at the center of how the football media cover the clubs, the league, and the game. Mangers have a rigorous press conference schedule and are routinely asked questions about matters well beyond tactics or squad management, including questions about their lives outside of football and their views on bigger-picture matters at the club or the league: transfer spending, their own job status (!), business ventures, VAR policy, FIFA and league schedules, and sometimes even politics and international affairs.

I don’t list this range of questions to suggest they’re necessarily out of bounds. On the contrary, I think it’s perfectly reasonable to ask Eddie Howe, who makes £5.2 million a year as Newcastle’s manager, what he thinks about sportswashing. And I find it entirely reasonable and even sometimes desirable that journalists ask Ange Postecoglou, who makes £6.5 million a year as Tottenham’s manager, what he thinks about VAR, what’s it’s like growing up as an immigrant in Australia, or how he handled managing in Japan with the language barrier.

I list this range of questions managers can expect to get in press conferences—consequently, the answers to which we can expect to read about, listen to, or watch—just to illustrate the extent to which the manager role has expanded in the last decade or so into so much more than the core job of setting up and coaching a football team.

Three Major Consequences of the Celebrity Manager Model

The first major consequence of the rise of the celebrity Premier League manager is the manager now speaks for and represents even those functions of the club and the league over which the manager has no control and possibly even little knowledge.

The second consequence follows in practice: this means we never hear from the people who actually do perform other key operations within the clubs and the league.

Accordingly, fans tend to treat everything the manager is asked to speak about as if a list of things the manager is also overseeing and responsible for, even if that’s plainly not the case.

For example, although clubs have varying degrees of cooperation and collaboration between their managers and their front-office staff on the football operations side of things—the Director of Football, the Technical Director, the Head of Recruitment—managers generally do not make final decisions or have full control over player signings and budgets. Yet we speak of players as ‘an Ange player’ or 'a club signing’ without really knowing the full context of player recruitment and club transactions.

The third consequence follows accordingly: the football media write and speak about football transfers, squad building, wage structures, and other matters pertaining to the executive level of the club primarily through the lens of, and in the words of, the managers, because the mangers are the ones sitting right in front of the media, the only ones at the club who routinely walk out and sit in front of a microphone and a bunch of recording cell phones and answer questions.

It’s unacceptable.

In recent press conferences, Ange has repeated in various ways that Spurs’ recent run of results is unacceptable. He’s right.

But what’s also unacceptable is the fact that no one from the club executive offices has any accountability before the media.

After all, it’s plain to see that the Tottenham squad are not only depleted with injuries and illnesses, but obliterated with exhaustion. I confess, even as a fan, that I got a sickening feeling watching the second half of the match at Hoffenheim, even in victory, because it felt like the kind of workplace negligence that you’d make a bigger deal of if it weren’t unsympathetically rich ‘millionaire footballers’ suffering the consequences.

The players struggled to move in the way a middle-distance runner seizes up at the end of a race in full anaerobic mode, when the muscles are flooded with lactic acid. That the group of players included 5 teenagers at one point made it even more difficult to watch, made it feel even more negligent and wrong. Archie Gray and Lucas Bergvall, both just 18 years old, simultaneously collapsed on the pitch at the final whistle.

It’s no wonder, then, that within just the first few minutes of the league match against Leicester City, Spurs looked tired already. I had a feeling after watching the Hoffenheim game that we’d probably lose to Leicester on the weekend, because I couldn’t imagine how players who looked that tired and broken down could possibly recover in time. It’s too easy to look at the ideal version of a side and the bare metrics and think of course Tottenham should beat recently promoted Leicester, losers of their last 7 games, and discount the role that energy and fatigue play in high-level professional sports.

The point here is that what’s been happening on the pitch, both in terms of poor match results and in terms of player wellbeing, is significantly an effect of the actions—or inactions—of key executives at Tottenham Hotspur. And yet it’s the manager—not the people who bear the greater share of responsibility for causing the situation—who comes out several times a week and answers the same questions over and over again about the tired, depleted squad and the poor results.

What Needs to Change

I think it’s time we hear from Spurs’ Chief Football Officer, Scott Munn, and Technical Director Johan Lange, as well as from our chairman, Daniel Levy. I don’t expect any of them to divulge sensitive information, private recruitment strategies, etc., but I do think we’ve reached the point at which Ange Postecoglou deserves some verbal backing and reassurance before the press.

It would be one thing if all this happened in October or April, but Spurs have now played 7 games in the month of January, which also happens to be during a transfer window. That’s 7 missed opportunities to provide relief to a squad that’s running on fumes, perhaps dangerously so for the health and careers of our players.

Reframing the Narrative

Keep in mind, just because the massive industry that is the Premier League and the para-industry that is football media prefer to disproportionately frame everything that’s going wrong at Spurs right now in terms of the manager doesn’t mean we have to adopt that framing.

In fact, it’s illogical to do so, given what we know about the state of the squad and the responsibilities of football operations executives at a Premier League club.

So we have a choice as fans and as commentators.

One option is to carry on as we’ve been, toiling in our modest garages without looking out the window, thinking of the present and future of the club in terms of what Ange Postecoglou has or hasn’t done, must or must do to bring us out of this nadir.

But another option is to recognize that this quaint story about a manager taking it all upon his shoulders is just that. We can look out the window and recognize that we’re surrounded by a great, cold industry that uses managers as frontmen and fall-guys for the failings of people who actually do have the power to alter club fortunes in the most basic ways under such trying circumstances.

Personally, I’ll take the second option. I want to hear about 7 failed opportunities to bring in direly needed relief in this January window, and I want to hear about it directly from those responsible for making it happen.