Mark Langdon: Tottenham's Levy tax must change

Be careful what you wish for. Whenever supporters of a stable club ask for change, up pops a reference to Alan Curbishley and his departure from Charlton at the end of the 2005-06 season as a warning to anyone daring to dream.

Curbs had done a superb 15-year stint with the Addicks, establishing them as a mid-table Premier League club, and history claims Charlton fans wanted to kick on. Charlton went down the next season and have never come back to the Premier League, bouncing around the Championship and League One.

You could successfully argue that somewhere between tier two and three is Charlton's natural habitat and they would have been swallowed up eventually by the subsequent Premier League juggernauts. You could also quite easily make the case for saying the Addicks' problem was replacing Curbishley with Iain Dowie, Les Reed and Alan Pardew all within a few months of each other rather than just getting rid of Curbs per se.

There are many members of the Be Careful What You Wish For gang defending the ownership of Tottenham. The feeling is they are a well-run club with a fine stadium, and while similar-sized clubs such as Leeds, Aston Villa, Newcastle have all had their ownership issues in that period which resulted in relegation, Spurs have developed into regular European qualifiers which is a decent effort for a club who last won the league in 1961.

There's no divine right to trophies and chairman Daniel Levy is widely regarded as a top-notch business guru who has comfortably led Spurs away from the choppy waters which nearly drowned Everton, but this year marks 25 years of his stewardship, during which time Tottenham have won the League Cup once.

Manager Ange Postecoglou is second-favourite in the sack race and must be fearing the worst from the next three matches against top-flight opposition coming in the shape of Newcastle and Arsenal in the Premier League and Liverpool in the EFL Cup. Spurs are 11th in the Premier League and Levy has sacked managers for less.

However, the manager is rarely the problem at White Hart Lane.

There is a direct correlation between success in football and wage bill expenditure, even if Manchester United are doing their best to disprove the theory. United have still won trophies in the last two seasons, but the anomaly of their extraordinary wastefulness cannot detract from a fairly obvious point: The more money you are prepared to pay players, the better the player who arrives and the more chance of success. Net transfer spend is nowhere near as important as the wage bill.

And this is where Levy falls woefully short of his rivals. Deloitte's last published figures show Tottenham's revenue being the eighth-highest in world football, comfortably ahead of Chelsea and Arsenal, but on reported wage bills Spurs are only the seventh biggest spenders in the Premier League according to Capology and are said to be paying around £65m less per year in wages than their two biggest London rivals.

That's despite the cash cow which is the new stadium with NFL games, Beyonce concerts, go-karting, rugby union and whatever else can be hosted to accompany some of the highest ticket prices in Europe. It's £88.50 to stand behind the goal against Newcastle, £98.50 to sit in a similar area and in excess of £100 for a non-hospitality ticket on the sides of the stadium.

Deloitte's last figures show Tottenham have the lowest wages to revenue ratio spend in the Premier League (you'll never sing that) and could comfortably punch at a much greater financial level if the ownership was genuinely interested in success. Instead, they finished Sunday's draw against Wolves with Fraser Forster in goal and a left side comprising Sergio Reguilon and Timo Werner.

Be careful what you wish for, eh?