Tottenham Hotspur players have been left outraged by chairman Daniel Levy’s pay packet of more than £6million last season, according to The Times.
The newspaper claim that news of Levy’s salary of £6.013million in 2016/17 has caused unrest in the stunned dressing room, with it coming at a time when Levy is urging players to accept pay restraint.
The Times report that Tottenham have recently refused to meet the salary demands of several players in negotiations that have grown tense, with players becoming unhappy about the club’s low wage ceiling.
Levy’s salary equates to £115,000-a-week, which is a more than the basic salary of Tottenham’s top earner Harry Kane, with the chairman’s salary more than doubling from the season before when he was paid £2.84million.
That increase is said to be made up of a massive bonus for delivering the new stadium and one for the club’s record turnover of £306.3million.
OPINION
While it is obviously impossible to know how true these claims are, you would not blame the Tottenham players for being unhappy about Levy’s salary. His pay packet is around double that of any other Premier League executive last season, and means he was paid more than any player in the Tottenham squad. That, allied to the fact that he has been asking players to accept lower-than-average wages, means that player unrest about the situation is in many ways justified. If the story is true, then Levy is bound to have some tough discussions in the near future when he negotiates new contracts with several Tottenham stars.