A few days before the first Christmas of the millennium, Daniel Levy bought control of Spurs. Not everybody reacted with festive cheer. Cornelius Sierhuis, chairman of AEK Athens, warned: “I hate to say this, but the deal does not bode well for Tottenham.” The Daily Mirror carried his quotes in a story headlined: “Wreckers! AEK Athens boss warns: ENIC will ruin Tottenham.”

Fast forward 18-and-a-half years. If you were setting up a football club from scratch and could pluck one person from the Tottenham Hotspur stadium, the smart choice would not be Harry Kane, Christian Eriksen or even Mauricio Pochettino. It would be Levy, the biggest star of Tottenham’s journey from a club so comic it coined its own word for fecklessness (“Spursy”) to Champions