Must say I’m totally won over by Daniel Levy. He is a true football man and loves and cares for his club deeply. He knows how to deal with players on many levels as well as have a great rapport with his manager.
Before this series, he was portrayed as a mean money man, but I’ve seen him as a decent guy who loves the business of Tottenham.
I’m guessing he is a far better CEO than Woodward.
There’s literally nothing you can learn from Levy’s heavily stage managed appearance in this documentary. He sounds like a walking PR exercise in this. Nothing he says comes across as remotely genuine. Not a genuine flicker of emotion, not a stressful or real moment. He appears always in reflective mood to tell us how hard his job is and what a top guy he is caring about the community. We never see him actually working or facing real situations. His appearances are meaningless, and clearly constructed to make him look as good as possible. As he is undoubtedly the driving force behind this documentary, it just feeds into my impression that he is a self absorbed ego maniac. I wasn’t impressed by him at all. He didn’t say anything remotely insightful or intelligent. In the one vaguely candid moment when Mourinho is discussing the development of Harry Winks, Levy has literally nothing to contribute, Just blind agreement because he didn’t want to get caught on camera saying anything that could later be construed as him not knowing what he was talking about.
The more I watch this, the more I realise how superficial and uninformative this documentary really is. It’s a glorified PR exercise and we stately see anything of any real substance. Half of every episode is talking up the facilities and achievements of the club and putting them into a context that infers awe, but to any long time follower of football, aren’t particularly impressive and lack context against bigger clubs.
The most interesting parts are the Mourinho team talks, which are at least candid, if not heavily edited. We really get a good view of how negative his approach really is. Despite the Amazon crew rolling out one player every episode to tell us what an amazing coach he is, you get the impression looking at the player’s body language and faces, that they are wearing of his reductive approach to the game and aren’t buying into his methods. Pretty much exactly what we’ve seen happen at all his previous clubs. It makes alarming viewing if you are a Tottenham fan.
A lot of people saying Dier looks like a prick. But I liked his passion. He seemed like a real person, and footballers these days aren’t even vaguely relatable to ordinary people. Dele Allí seems like the most banal and disconnected human being I’ve encountered. His memorable sound bites include asking wether people put toothpaste on a toothbrush before or after water, and informing us that he made a can of baked beans in the microwave like it’s an achievement. He seemed half brain dead to me.
Harry Winks came across as a genuinely good kid and Harry Kane as the most dim witted individual imaginable.
Just to go back to Levy, in the meeting with Eriksen in which people say Eriksen didn’t come across well. What struck me was that Wriksen was there for a genuine meeting. He had communicated his desire to leave and it had obviously been agreed long before. These things don’t happen overnight and a lot will have happened off camera. His asking for an update seems reasonable. But Levy, you can see, is acutely aware of the cameras. Him restating in that meeting that they would match any offer and they didn’t want him to leave was so unnecessary. He didn’t even wait for a response because he knew it was rhetorical. It had all already been agreed. Levy is there restating it for the cameras to make himself look so reasonable and warm. But He just comes across as so fake. You can see in Eriksens face that he is completely baffled.
The more you watch this the more it stinks as a Levy vanity project, and appears increasingly small time.