Daniel Levy and Tottenham Women wages under scrutiny in Guardian inequality investigation | OneFootball

Daniel Levy received £5.76m in remuneration during the 2024-25 season, more than the combined wages of Tottenham Hotspur Women’s entire playing and staff group.

That is not just a striking Spurs number. It goes straight to a familiar issue in women’s football: what clubs say about growth, and what their spending priorities actually show.

What the Guardian investigation found at Tottenham

According to The Guardian, Tottenham’s latest accounts show the club’s highest-paid director, widely understood to be Levy, earned £5.76m for the year ending 30 June 2025. That was a 54% increase on the previous year and, per football finance expert Kieran Maguire, made him the Premier League’s highest-paid director last season.

By contrast, Tottenham Women’s total salaries and bonuses came to £3.73m. Once social security and pension costs are included, the women’s total wage bill stood at £4.3m across 64 players and staff, with average earnings of about £58,000 per employee.

There is nuance in the figures. Tottenham Women’s wage bill rose 23% year on year, which is fine in principle, and commercial income more than doubled from £1.46m to £3.34m. But the team still posted a £2.83m loss after tax, while broadcast revenue stayed flat at £267,414 and prize money dropped by about £600,000.

Those spending levels also leave Spurs in a middle band by WSL standards rather than among the clubs setting the pace. As seen in earlier She Kicks coverage of WSL wage structures at Manchester United and Arsenal, the gap between clubs is still telling its own story about ambition, depth and long-term planning.

Why the numbers matter beyond one headline

£5.76m for one executive, £4.3m for an entire women’s operation. That matters because it reduces any talk of institutional commitment to a very simple comparison of value.

The point is not that clubs should never pay senior executives well. The point is that when one former chair’s annual remuneration exceeds the combined wages of a women’s squad and staff unit, the club is showing where the hierarchy really sits.

Tottenham’s women are not standing still on the pitch. The accounts relate to a season in which Spurs finished 11th, but the current campaign has brought clear improvement, with the team sitting fifth with three games left and nearly doubling last season’s win tally.

That matters because progress in women’s football often arrives despite structural restraint rather than because that restraint has been lifted. Better results can make the underlying imbalance easier to ignore, when in reality success should strengthen the case for deeper investment, not soften it.

The revenue picture points the same way. Commercial income rising from £1.46m to £3.34m is a genuine positive, but broadcast income remaining static underlines how little control most women’s teams still have over the wider financial architecture around them. Growth is happening, but not yet on terms that make clubs treat their women’s side as core business.

That is significant because it gets to the core governance tension. Women’s teams are often presented as strategic priorities right up until the numbers reveal they are still being funded like adjacent projects.

Why this fits a wider pattern in women’s football

That fits a wider pattern She Kicks has been tracking for some time. Whether it is ownership structures, internal accounting or prize-money distribution, women’s football keeps running into the same issue: the game is being asked to prove its value inside systems built to privilege the men’s side first.

There are club-level versions of that, as seen in She Kicks’ earlier coverage of Aston Villa’s PSR-linked profit picture, where the women’s team became part of a wider financial strategy rather than simply a football department. There are also international versions, such as the Matildas Asian Cup pay gap story, where women’s success still translated into markedly lower reward than the men’s equivalent.

Tottenham are hardly alone in this. Arsenal’s women’s wage bill at £11.3m shows what a different level of commitment looks like, while Manchester United’s £5.88m and Brighton’s £5m also sit above Spurs. Liverpool, at £3.12m, are below them. The broader point is not a league table of virtue; it is that wage bills remain one of the clearest indicators of whether a club is treating its women’s team as competitive priority or controlled cost.

Spurs’ own background matters here too. Tottenham Women have been in the WSL since 2019 and have grown steadily, but supporters have long questioned whether that growth has matched the club’s scale, resources and rhetoric. For a club of Tottenham’s stature, mid-range investment still reads as a choice.

What happens next at Spurs

The next pressure point is the 2025-26 accounts. Tottenham are understood to have increased investment in the women’s side this season and repositioned women’s football as a strategic priority after an internal review.

If that is real, the wage bill, staffing levels and infrastructure spend should start to move more decisively. Improvement to fifth in the table is useful evidence for the football case, but the financial case has already been made.

What to watch now is whether Spurs begin to close the gap between language and allocation. For a club that says the women’s team matters, the numbers need to start looking like it.