Anyone read the Annual financial report Spurs released the other week (it's on the official site)? Go on, one of you must have printed it out and sat yourselves on the bog, reading glasses perched on nose and read through countless pages of number-crunching. No? You prefer the more rounded figures of Front magazine like me? Good on you. Thankfully there are people out there who don't bother with glossy soft-porn publications and prefer to study and then dig out the type of information that makes us lazy ones ooh when we hear it.
Our turnover made all the headlines along with confirmation of our spending, but we missed the bit about pay-cuts (at least I did) taken by Levy and the directors. A 32.5% cut. Millionaires with less millions and no big shout out about it. No shareholder dividend pay-out either this year. It's all on page 34 of the report (if your copy of Front is in too much of an abused state to turn the pages).
From £1M per year down to £650,000 in the space of three years.
The club make profit and our man at the helm takes a cut. How refreshing. Taking one for the team. Not that taking home 650K isn't too shabby wage. It would seem there's no room for ego's here. Greater good and all that jazz, ENIC are firmly putting their money where their mouth is - although the less bites taken into rotten apples (Bentley, Bent, Pav) the more of that turn-over we're left with. Hard times, bit future plans - the priority is the club and therefore the fans.
If Levy needs to make up some extra cash for Christmas shopping, I suggest he loads up a white van with the left over copies of The Opus (that's the ones left over from the batch used during the half-time raffle ticket give-aways from last season) and hits the high road on match-days. Get Harry in the back and he'll have the lot cleared out by 3pm kick-off.
"Opus, mint condition, £500. And this one, signed by Robbie Keane, you can have that one for £250"