It's a nice attempt to deflect blame from Spurs but lets get things straight.
Spurs paid Levy a £3m bonus today for delivering a stadium 9 months late and £400m over budget.
Spurs' players aren't losing a penny.
Spurs are the 8th richest club in the world.
Joe Lewis is worth £4.5Bn.
The rest of the Top 6 have guaranteed their staff's wages until at least August.
Norwich are a newly promoted club with owners who can't afford to prop them up, and are only furloughing as few staff as possible - and only ones who cannot do any work for the club at the moment anyway.
- Levy has ruined his reputation permanently today.
- Spurs did not pay Levy a bonus today. Or yesterday. Or the day before that. It was paid in 2019, at the end of the last financial year - long before 99.99% of the world's population had ever heard of the word
coronavirus or before phrases like
social distancing ever entered the common vernacular. You've been had by mischievous reporting.
- When a construction finishes late and over budget because of a major error of a highly technical, niche nature by a contractor, you don't blame the client.
- In normal circumstances, Spurs has the 8th biggest turnover in club football, granted. But with all operations indefinitely at a halt, Spurs currently has virtually no turnover at all. Spurs will also suffer a greater loss of revenue as a consequence of coronavirus than the vast majority of clubs because of the large number of high profile and lucrative non football events that were scheduled to be held at the stadium this coming summer but which have now been or will soon be cancelled.
- Joe Lewis doesn't have £4.5 billion in cash. The vast majority of his wealth is tied up in the network of companies that comprise Tavistock Group. Pretty much all of those companies will be haemorrhaging money right now too. Even so, I see why you make the point. But Daniel Levy has no such wealth. His only major asset is his shareholding in Spurs.
- The rest of the top Six don't have a £600 million stadium debt to service.
- Spurs, too, have only furloughed those members of staff who now have nothing to do. It would be illegal to furlough staff who are still working. That is the point. Those who still have work to do will still be paid by the club at 80% of their normal pay. Levy and the other directors included.
- Spurs are also hoping that a deal can be struck with the players. But the Premier League has agreed to negotiate that deal collectively. They are still waiting on agreement from the PFA. So Spurs are not yet in a position to announce a reduction in player wages too.
Lastly, while I totally get the criticism, there has been an awful lot of ignorant nonsense posted about this - largely from Spurs twitterati I might add. People saying that the wages of non playing staff are so inconsequential; that the club can easily afford to carry on paying them indefinitely etc. They haven't considered that the 20% wage reduction will be only one of a raft of cost saving measures that the club has to implement. They haven't considered that most of the revenues that might not now be forthcoming had already been allocated elsewhere. They don't understand the critical importance of cashflow. They fail to concede that company finances might be rather more complex and delicate than they like to imply.
As I said before, far bigger companies than Spurs will be availing themselves of the furlough scheme. And most, if not all, football clubs eventually will too if, as I fear, we are in this for the long haul. There may well be no crowds at football matches or even no football matches at all for a year or more. We just don't know.
