• Manchester City have spent more than £200 million this summer • Spurs have yet to make a signing in the current transfer window

The Tottenham Hotspur chairman, Daniel Levy, has mocked the Premier League’s summer spending, labelling it “unsustainable”.

Spurs are yet to sign anyone for the new campaign and have let Kyle Walker leave for title rivals Manchester City – a club who have so far spent more than £200m in this transfer window. Manchester United and Chelsea have also been busy in the market, bringing in Romelu Lukaku and Álvaro Morata for big-money fees.

“My view is that it’s totally unsustainable,” Levy said after ringing the Nasdaq opening bell in Times Square on Spurs’ pre-season tour of the US. “I’m not sure if that’s the view of the other Premier League clubs, but certainly the prices that are being paid for other Premier League players, I can’t see it being sustainable in the long term. We’ve managed the club, we think, in a very appropriate way.

“I think I am a custodian of this football club. This club has been around since 1882 and when I leave it will be somebody else. I think we have a duty to manage the club appropriately. I don’t think that long term for any club it’s sustainable to spend more than you earn. You can have periods where you do but over the long term you can’t.

“I think that some of the activity that’s going on at the moment is just impossible to be sustainable. If somebody is spending £200m more than they’re earning then eventually it catches up with you. You can’t keep doing it. We’ve invested a lot of money in physical facilities for long-term growth. So we’ve got one of the world’s best training facilities. We’ve invested over £100m in that facility.

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“We’re now investing in the stadium. The stadium is fundamental because with that we get more fans and more income and that’s the way to clearly have a more sustainable business. At the same time the academy is important because we can produce our own players. We don’t have to go and spend £20, £30m, £40m on a player and obviously that homegrown player has an affinity with the club that a player we buy doesn’t.

“That’s what the fans want to see. They want to have that passion. That’s what you get with a homegrown player and that’s why people love Harry Kane and sing that he’s one of our own.”

Tottenham are currently building their new 61,000-seat stadium, which is expected to cost around £750m and is scheduled to open next year.

“Obviously when you’re building a stadium of this magnitude and it all has to be privately financed – there’s no state help whatsoever – it is a challenge,” Levy added.

“We have to find the right balance but I can honestly say it is not impacting us on transfer activity because we are not yet in a place where we have found a player that we want to buy who we cannot afford to buy.”