With the new stadium to pay for, the Spurs chairman is reliant on
Champions League revenue to balance the books and has acted with brutal swiftness in removing Mauricio PochettinoThe 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 1985 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. Seven 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.