ENIC Out?
I like to ask fellow lovers of the Premier League, Zambian ones, what attracts them exactly to their favourite football club — searching for some kind of … cultural connection — and often end up making a series of private deductions. When I turn the query upon myself, the response is convoluted. Tottenham, the place, is the birthplace of grime. It is the London I imagine both Charles Dickens and Guy Ritchie regard as fertile plotting ground for their capers. It’s also an area of the capital with a rich and complicated history with Jewishness, and around Jewishness and football, and this is precisely the sort of thing that appeals to a young, black and also literary man: the idea that a people can find both solace and fortune in a particular city, enough to even self-actualise.
But, you know, there were easier draws. I was an impressionable child. Upon returning from a sixth birthday in Stevenage, I decided I was to grow into some kind of Englishman, and that I’d wave the flag (yes, yes, St. George’s) for the Three Lions at every international tournament thereafter. Gary Lineker, before I discovered Liverpool and Ian Rush, was my favourite player. He scored neat goals, had a nifty celebration or two in him, and he wore a club kit that bore a striking resemblance to England’s. I don’t know what all of this means in the neo-colonial context of selling out young and early, and I have no immediate interest in finding out. The short-term point I’m making is that once I’d shed myself of grand and lofty identity politics, thank heavens, I had to find viable reasons to abide by the Tottenham crest.
That link upstairs, to a superb excerpt from the The People’s History of Tottenham Hotspur, says such fascinating things about who owns a football club — especially post-Super League fiasco. There are men like Daniel Levy and Joe Lewis, the principal shareholders of ENIC group, all across the game, who will pony up good money to purchase such an establishment. They own the paperwork, the gate receipts, the tangible returns from all that licensing and merchandising, etcetera. But in order to sustain a ‘brand’, to separate a club from every other side in the land, it is fans that must weave cultural fabric; the chants, the colours that tinge the streets, the heart-rumbling roars that power the highlights, guarantee the clicks. So where does all that place the naiveté of the global fan, like me, that doesn’t have to walk past the stadium because they can’t afford the most expensive ticket in the Premier League? That doesn’t sit so very high up in the stands, upon alighting for the first time post-pandemic, just so the club can ensure the visibility of its sponsors in better seats? That’s never once had to sit through anti-Semitic verse from rival fans, and actually contextualise the use of the term ‘Y*d’?
That’s a question the supporters on my absolute favourite Spurs podcast, The Fighting Cock, ask fairly regularly — largely because, increasingly, the British football supporter has to sit back and watch while owners pander to the needs of the global market. How to whitewash the working class histories of these teams, and thus package a fitting submission to the Internet’s endless and vampiric adoration of ‘winners’.
The most damaging aspect of the Super League melodrama last month was the fact that it re-positioned a self-styled people’s team like Tottenham Hotspur as no different from every other plc in the game. Daniel Levy, despite both Jewish heritage and a genuine attachment to Spurs, effectively underlined that he is willing to sacrifice the traditional fan to romance a unicorn consumer: the overseas supporter who will day one their PS5 purchase of FIFA 22, cop the new jersey every year no matter how atrocious it looks, soon pay north of £50 to attend a match day, and top up another five quid or so to stream ‘exclusive’ club content. The referendum on ENIC Group as owners of Tottenham Hotspur is not so much where does this leave the local Tottenham supporter; it’s where does it leave the bloody football?
If laid out carefully and without histrionics, the tape is pretty incriminating. Levy sacked Mauricio Pochettino after ignoring the manager’s pleas, for at least a year and a half, for regular personnel adjustments. He sacked him, furthermore, four months into a season when the manager’s projections about staleness materialised. He replaced that manager with one who not only dabbles in an ethos that runs counter to all things Tottenham Hotspur; but whose reputation was built in service to the ambitions of one of our fiercest rivals.
I quite liked the taste of that latter dagger at the time, what it would mean to Chelsea fans, and in another breath I can justify the appointment. You can also argue that no one in a cash-happy sport saw the pandemic coming. But if I’m to make the case for Levy as someone that has enabled the club to exist within its means, I too have to wonder what that really says about a stadium that now represents a massive existential burden. It’s got a gorgeous bar that allegedly runs a mile, and the turf’s got a fancy electric thingy that raises an NFL field at the press of a button, and it’s got a thousand more seats than Arsenal’s does (LOLLLLLLLLLS); but who is it all for, Mr. Levy? For a football club that wants to finally reward its neurotic, long-suffering fans by winning, or for the super-tourists from abroad that will actually afford to visit it?
Contrary to the sign on the door, I’m not actually ‘ENIC OUT’. I think when you extract the four or five clubs that are funded by billionaires and/or the reserves of legacy, Levy and Tottenham Hotspur do a bang-up job of staying both relevant and irritating. I do not believe, either, that holding up the accomplishments of Leicester City does anyone any good, because there’s no real playbook for the hundreds of other cash-strapped clubs across the Isles to wake up and photocopy. The Super League shit-show also puts paid to the notion that some magical owner is out there just waiting to show your football club real love.
But — and here at last is the but — one does have to wonder: what if Tottenham Hotspur, just once every blue moon, overpaid for something besides a long-term vision? For something that just might, quickly and almost certainly, impact the football itself in mercurial fashion?
