I think he did a great job within the constraints ENIC imposed on him, there have been dubious calls over that time but most of those have been him “backing” a manager or DOF or us as a club not being a big enough attraction to actually land the players we wanted.
It’s easy to point fingers at the guy in charge, but who here could name another chairman who would have come in and done a better job?
The fact we have crashed so spectacularly over the course of a few months since the nepo’s and their guys have taken over shows its not such an easy job.
He did an incredible job business-wise. No-one could've done any better (or indeed has). He was the perfect face of the Lewis Family investment in that regard.
He repeatedly got the football side of things wrong, and I think that is where the questions lie. How much of it was him versus his remit? How much of it was ego versus doing the right thing? How much of it was applying business brain to football matters, a translation which requires several bridges and parts to have any chance of success as the connection is not binary?
I get the impression he tried to find a bridge several times. Arnesen was big, so wasw Commoli, Baldini was another...I think the single biggest factor in our demise has been the inability to find the humanity and special sauce of Tottenham as a soul -as a football ethos- since we moved to the stadium, and I think sacking Pochettino and replacing him with Mourinho without giving Mourinho the tools HE needed was an enormous error (despite Mourinho saying he didn't need any - a 'football' person would've known that was BS)...I also wonder how big covid was in derailing us for a while. In one sense our timing was superb because we opened the stadium months before, in another, we needed it to be open a few years without interruption.
The other major errors IMO, were Munn and Lange, two men who do not seem to know emotion in the football sense. Sometimes the beautiful game requires more than a set of metrics. Sometimes it requires gut-level action, something Lange in particular has been unable to achieve at the right time.
The final one? Removing Levy when they did. It was absurd. Make that move at the end of a season, not at the end of a window into a new season with a new manager. Pathetically poor timing which obviously destabilized the entire club...
