Libero 055: Arsenal, Tottenham, Succession And Serious People

Libero

Sports, Soccer, Society & Culture

4.9 • 867 Ratings

🗓️ 23 September 2025

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Two of the biggest Premier League stories in September came away from the pitch, and specifically in the boardrooms of Tottenham Hotspur and Arsenal. First was the sacking of Daniel Levy, Tottenham’s seemingly all-powerful chairman, after 24 years running Spurs in his own unique way. Then, one week later, came the removal of Tim Lewis, Arsenal’s executive vice-chair, who had run Arsenal for the last few years. On today’s Libero, Jack Pitt-Brooke, Miguel Delaney and Tariq Panja look at these moves and explain why exactly Levy and Tim Lewis were fired. Was it because of performance? Or was it because a new generation of owners want to operate their clubs differently? These two stories have been compared to ‘Succession’, and both point to the tension between the ultra-wealthy owners of these generational assets and the executive class who run them. So is this the central tension that defines modern clubs? And are we - as Miguel suggests - now in ‘the age of the owner’? P1: (09:48) P2: (36:34) Produced by: Tom Bassam Email in via liberopodcast0@gmail.com Subscribe to our YouTube channel @liberopod Follow us on X @podcast_libero Follow us on Bluesky @liberopodcast.bsky.social Follow us on Instagram @liberopod Follow us on TikTok @liberopod Follow us on Facebook @liberopod The Sam Wallace column mentioned in the podcast can be found here, you will need to get past The Telegraph paywall. Music: Kid Kodi - Blue Dot Sessions Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Libero, the podcast about the most important of the least important things, as Peter Hillwood once said.
0:10.6	My name is Jack Pitbrook. I'm from The Athletic. As ever, I'm going to start today's episode by saying, please, please, please, like, share, subscribe, comment on our content. You can find us on X, on Blue Sky, on TikTok, on Instagram. It all makes a difference. Now, I'm joined today by Tarot Pange for the New York Times and by Miguel Delaney from The Independent. Is it too late to say happy birthday, Miguel? It never is, never is. It will be the second time on the show I've been wished happy birthday, so that's quite nice.
0:39.5	Did you have a nice birthday weekend?
0:41.2	Yeah, I did. I did. I talked to you today about having my birthday in Bilbao itself.
0:45.6	And on Friday, yeah, I went to a few drinks around London Bridge.
0:49.9	People bought me shots, which I'm a bit old for now, and I don't really have a good effect.
0:54.5	Yeah.
0:55.7	How many Liberal members were at your birthday?
0:59.4	Four, including myself.
1:02.0	Oh, wow.
1:02.6	Yeah.
1:03.1	A party in two countries.
1:04.5	I think that's a fairly great birthday week ago.
1:08.2	And then, I guess the highlight of your birthday weekend was Arsenal won, Manchester City one.
1:13.5	Yeah, you could say that.
1:15.1	No, it was, I mean, it was a strange game, but an absorbing game.
1:19.8	Like, I didn't think it was a very, maybe this is a lot of modern football, given what we
1:23.9	discuss a lot on the podcast, but as a pure football match, it wasn't great in terms of things that happened and things that excite you as a sort of a vehicle for storylines and how developments, you know, played into storylines. I thought it was fascinating. You know, obviously there's been a big debate about, you know, Artetta and where he is.
1:45.7	I thought the most interesting thing about the match was this historical break of Guardiola
1:51.1	doing something that 15 years ago or in the middle of that inter-Barsalona match,
1:57.0	you could never have imagined because in this case, he was into Milan.
2:00.4	And I think there's, like, the lad's touched on this recently in terms of the post-cep world.
	...

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