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Stories

System failure

Why have a director of football as well as a head coach? Luke Chapman is not alone in wondering if the answer at Spurs is to provide an extra person to blame in a crisis, ahead of the club’s chairman

As divorces go, it was messy, underhand and undignified. Two months after Martin Jol’s position became untenable and hours before kick-off in the UEFA Cup tie against Getafe, mobiles buzzed with the news that Spurs chairman Daniel Levy had finally decided the union with his manager was over. With his players conspicuously failing to do it for their boss, Jol then had to sit on the bench and play the part of manager one last time, a sorry end in keeping with recent events at the Lane.

Executive stress

The menace of meddling chairmen

“The only crisis we have here is when we’ve run out of champagne in the boardroom,” said John Cobbold when Ipswich chairman. The Cobbolds, whose family brewery was one of the town’s main employers, are often held up to exemplify the attitude of the patrician dynasties who used to own many teams. They may have looked upon their clubs as heirlooms – one of the last of the breed, Peter Hill-Wood at Arsenal, has been magnificently disdainful of the rumoured interest in the club from US billionaire Stan Kroenke – but they also knew better than to interfere with the manager’s role.