Tottenham Women have chance to shine after Levy’s exit

Eight days before Levy’s Caesarean defenestration, recently appointed women’s head coach Martin Ho had said: “Daniel’s got very big plans for this club and for this team moving forward, from facilities, infrastructure and so on,” which does, to be fair, sound very much like Daniel Levy, an infrastructure guy to his core, football’s Ray Kroc.

Levy never appeared wholly convinced by the financial merits of the women’s game, investing just enough to keep up appearances without ever really committing. He and Tottenham were relatively late to the women’s game and seemingly saw WSL status as the only real necessity.

His big idea was to abolish relegation from the WSL, the clearest sign he considered the whole thing too much of a risk. And so results from their six WSL seasons have read: seventh, eighth, fifth, ninth, sixth, 11th – up, down, up, down. They have not won a competitive match since January.

Those around Spurs increasingly mention “One Club” or “One Hotspur”, and the men’s and women’s projects have increasingly become aligned on- and off-pitch. Both now use the same training facilities, although a new women’s academy is being developed at Whitewebbs Park in Enfield.

Ange Postecoglou and Robert Vilahamn both arrived at Spurs in the summer of 2023 as grand ideologues bearing heady optimism and high lines. Vilahamn masterminded the women’s team’s first-ever North London derby win and reached their first FA Cup final. Postecoglou went unbeaten in his first 10 league games and won the Europa League.

Both were eventually sacked having finished directly above the relegation spots, the palaces they dreamed up crumbling around them, floodwater seeping through the floorboards. If alignment was the primary aim, they nailed it. A former assistant coach at Everton and Manchester United, Ho spent two years in Norway with SK Brann, reaching the Champions League quarter-finals in 2023-24. He is more pragmatic than his predecessor, rather pointedly referring to the need for a “plan A-Z”.

Even more so than Postecoglou, the supposed freedom of Vilahamn’s philosophy ended up being restricting and limiting, so there are plenty of easy wins here. Fresh start, reset the vibes. Say things like: “I want that when someone looks at a Tottenham team, they can be proud of it” and “I will never put a ceiling on what we can achieve, because in the field, you limit your capacity of what you can do.” Shake everyone’s hand before and after your conversations. Mention Pep Guardiola and Thomas Frank as inspirations, but also Eddie Jones and Kobe Bryant, fascinating choices in 2025.

In what must be a damning dig at Vilahamn, Ho and the executive team appear to believe that new signings are less important than simply getting more from the current squad. Only two new signings were made – 19-year-old Japanese centre-back Tōko Koga and Cathinka Tandberg, a striker from Hammarby. “It’s not always what’s in front of you that can be the problem,” women’s captain Bethany England told The Observer. “If you can restructure something, you can have the right moving parts. You just need the parts to start working together.”

Kit Graham recently returned from a second ACL injury. England says “this is going to be the Kit Graham season”, while striker Martha Thomas – who is without a WSL goal since December 2023 – scored in Tottenham’s final pre-season match. Winger Matilda Vinberg has been used centrally under Ho, with promising early results. This squad is certainly not the 11th-best in the league.

A team which has been dangerously dependent on England, who scored nearly a third of their league goals last season, might finally be diversifying. England clearly does not look back on the Vilahamn era fondly: “In the environment, we know where the problems were, what was going on and we dealt with it the best we could, at the time, and we can only move forward from that. It would be criminal now to just sit and dwell on what.

“I’m also not a person that has any issue challenging if I see something wrong. And I did challenge – sometimes it was heard, sometimes it wasn’t.” Now 31, having won four WSL titles with Chelsea and earned 26 Lionesses caps, England is the face and star of this Tottenham side. In a reversal of the greatest complaint against Levy’s management of the men’s team, in 2023-24 Tottenham women’s wage bill was 102% of its £3.4m revenue, a sign that little has been done to achieve any semblance of sustainability or independence.

“There’s been huge changes in this club,” England explained. “It’s become a lot more professional, a lot more access to things. We do need to find a way of getting more investment into the women’s team, because we don’t want to solely rely on the men’s resources, the men’s funding. We want to showcase the game for ourselves and not follow in the men’s footsteps.”

She is also optimistic for the future, refreshed by working with Ho: “[People are] going to see a much more confident team possessing the ball. Our intensity has definitely lifted. And I think they’re going to see a team that has the willingness, that belief, that they can go forward and punish big teams.

“I don’t think we’re going to be a team that ever wants to sit back against what you would class as the bigger team. And I think it will make for a much more exciting season.” Responsibility for overseeing the women’s team will now likely fall to CEO Vinai Venkatesham, who joined earlier this summer from Arsenal having been a key force in developing their Champions League-winning structure.

England has spoken to Venkatesham “at great lengths on a few occasions”, and believes that he wants “to help not only invest in the women’s team, but make sure things are running much smoother to help us further down the line. You can see there’s clear structure and pathways that they want to follow to help us.”

Without Levy, that structure and those pathways are murkier but more open, with a wider horizon than before, greater scope and ambition, if a larger margin for error. Part of the Lewis family’s decision to remove Levy was wanting “more wins, more often”. Hopefully the women’s team will finally be more than a footnote in this supposed new era of success.

Photograph by Alamy