The lament that football has traded its soul for money has been associated with a departing manager of Tottenham Hotspur long before Mauricio Pochettino was sacked five months after taking the club to a miraculous Champions League final. The famous quote from Keith Burkinshaw, as he walked away from White Hart Lane in 1984 despite having won the Uefa Cup, was attributed to him by the veteran sportswriter Ken Jones: “There used to be a football club over there.”
Burkinshaw was working at a club which had sought to exploit new money coming into football by becoming the first to float on the stock market, bypassing the game’s century-old restrictions on owners making money out of clubs. Eight years later Alan Sugar had a vote as the Spurs owner to select BSkyB as the exclusive pay-TV broadcaster for the Premier League over free-to-air ITV, at the same time that Sugar’s company Amstrad was making the satellite dishes.
Written by David Conn
This news first appeared on https://www.theguardian.com/football/2019/nov/20/tottenham-glory-daniel-levy-spurs-champions-league-mauricio-pochettino under the title “Tottenham love to talk of glory, but for Daniel Levy business is business”. Bolchha Nepal is not responsible or affiliated towards the opinion expressed in this news article.
