What is the big idea? Levy’s second-class Tottenham Women mired in mediocrity | Jonathan Liew | OneFootball

A couple of years ago it was reported that Daniel Levy, the man in charge of Tottenham Hotspur, was lobbying to abolish promotion and relegation to and from the Women’s Super League. Levy’s vision was of a steady-state league, with no mobility and therefore no real jeopardy, where the same teams competed for the same stuff every season. How we laughed. As it turned out, he needn’t have gone to the trouble. It pretty much ended up happening anyway.

For Tottenham at least, a season that began replete with possibility has buffed down to a blunt point. Marooned in mid-table, eliminated from both cup competitions, safe from relegation and well out of the Champions League race, their last nine games – starting with the north London derby at the Emirates on Sunday – are essentially pure content, dead rubbers, puff football. Will they put in a strong run of results and finish in fifth? Or will they falter and slump to seventh? Tune in to find out!

And this has pretty much been the story of Spurs in recent years, barring a brief flirtation with relegation in 2022-23: an entire women’s football operation whose success basically turns on whether or not they can finish ahead of Everton. Almost invariably they beat the weaker teams at the bottom. Almost invariably they lose to the big four. Since winning promotion to the WSL in 2019 their record against Arsenal, Chelsea and the two Manchester clubs in all competitions reads: played 54, won two, drawn six, lost 46. All of which raises a salient question: what, really, is the big idea here? What is the growth plan, the blueprint for progress?

This is a question that gathers urgency when you examine Tottenham’s systems and processes in more detail. Under Robert Vilahamn, Spurs have sought to play an attractive, high-energy passing style of football that moves the ball quickly up the pitch to create scoring chances. And, you know, who doesn’t love that?

In practice, and certainly against the bigger clubs, it works out a little differently. Tottenham pass the ball out from the back. Tottenham get pressed. Tottenham panic wildly. At which point, Tottenham either lose the ball or lump it long. This season Spurs are second in the WSL for touches in their own defensive third and only eighth for touches in the attacking third.

And fair enough, this is a defined style. But not really a style that has ever felt sustainable or effective, or threatened to get the best out of the club’s attacking talents. Meanwhile a team that was renowned for being dour but hard to break down under Rehanne Skinner has become the second-leakiest defence in the league.

Naturally, there are mitigating factors here. The serial injuries to Kit Graham, one of the few players able to take the ball under pressure and progress it with class, have been a major blow. The arrival of Lize Kop in January finally seems to have addressed the chronic lack of a top-class goalkeeper comfortable playing the ball with her feet. New signings such as Olivia Holdt and Anna Csiki still clearly need a period of adjustment to the league. An overreliance on Eveliina Summanen was badly exposed by her injury in January.

But perhaps the brutal truth is that for some time now, Tottenham have been trying to play champagne football with Lambrini footballers. An erratic recruitment strategy has swung from spending big on older established stars to signing young players with potential, and still boasts far more misses than hits. Vilahamn’s stated objective is to get Spurs into the Champions League within three years, but if anything the gap to the elite is actually widening.

At which point, with regrets, it is necessary to mention the plight of the men’s team, but only because these appear to be common plights with a common root. In a landscape where the biggest clubs are becoming ever more assertive in the transfer market, Levy’s Spurs have remained largely reactive: unwilling to dig deep and invest the sums that might genuinely help them make the leap out of mid-table, unwilling to commit to a defined strategy or identity for more than a couple of years at a time.

Peer even closer and the parallels are unmistakable. The made-for-television acquisition of Alex Morgan in 2020 coincides almost perfectly with Levy’s phase of hiring celebrity managers such as José Mourinho and Antonio Conte, straining to project Tottenham as a Proper Big Club. The panic spree of 2022-23 when Bethany England arrived for a record fee and saved Spurs from relegation tracks neatly with the chaos and short-termism of Conte’s final season. Ivan Perisic is basically the male Amy James-Turner. “Abolish relegation” is basically Levy’s bespoke twist on the European Super League.

And so to the current “Stay Humble” era, in which two appealing progressive coaches try to impose their maximalist ideas with minimalist resources. It should embarrass Levy that the men’s team should have to play a bunch of exhausted teenagers in defence because of inadequate recruitment. It should embarrass him that there are more Arsenal academy graduates than Spurs academy graduates in the women’s first-team squad. That no home-produced player has started in the WSL for them all season.

It should embarrass him that when Chloe Morgan left in 2020 she accused Tottenham of treating the women’s team like second-class citizens, that the women were not even allowed to train on the same site as the men until – according to reports – a shocked Alex Morgan had to persuade Levy to let them do so. It should embarrass him that Spurs are so clearly paying the price for those years of undernourishment, and that while Chelsea redraw the lines of the market, they are barely treading water now.

But, of course, Levy – like many of his ilk – is basically post-embarrassment, an owner who has confused his longevity and impregnability for a kind of enduring genius. Whose strategy for the women’s team appears to extend no further than simply hanging in there until the really big money starts rolling in. Fifth, seventh: who really cares?

There are good people underneath him. Vilahamn – who recently signed a new contract – has the makings of a fine coach. A new centre of excellence in Enfield, given approval this week over the objections of residents and environmental campaigners, will doubtless start producing the Spurs players of the future. The vision is there. But for now the conviction is absent.

“One club” is one of Vilahamn’s favourite phrases. He meets his counterpart Ange Postecoglou on a regular basis. The two teams share backroom staff and facilities and recruitment expertise and a common vision of fast, attacking football. In a way, their fates are yoked together. But a shared blessing can also be a shared curse.

Header image: [Photograph: Anna Gowthorpe/Tottenham Hotspur FC/Shutterstock]