Culture
The Briefing: Is Levy the problem at Tottenham and what can Man Utd learn from Brighton?
Welcome to The Briefing, where every Monday The Athletic discusses three of the biggest questions posed by the weekend’s Premier League action.
During this set of fixtures, Darwin Nunez rebooted his navigation software to lift Liverpool past Brentford, Arsenal gave up a late two-goal lead over Aston Villa to lose ground, Nottingham Forest continued to thrill, Manchester City romped back into the top four and the bottom three all lost (again).
But here, after another defeat at Everton, we will ask whether Tottenham’s biggest problem is their manager or the man who hired him, what Manchester United could learn from the most recent mid-table team to beat them and why Andoni Iraola is destined for a bigger stage than Bournemouth.
Surely, someone must go at Tottenham — but who?
We all know the answer to this one: football clubs cannot sack their players and firing the assistant-kit manager is unlikely to elicit the desired reaction.
So, despite winning three straight manager-of-the-month awards last season, returning Spurs to European competition and providing plenty of entertainment for neutrals over the last 18 months, Ange Postecoglou’s days as Tottenham boss look numbered.
A 3-2 defeat at Everton on Sunday, which was not as close as the scoreline suggests, means they have picked up only one point from their last six league games and remain stuck in 15th, one place and four points better off than their most recent conqueror but on track to match the club’s worst league finish for 31 years.
Given the fact that better returns did not keep Mauricio Pochettino, Nuno Espirito Santo and Antonio Conte in the job, Postecoglou cannot claim that speculation about his future is unfounded. And his pleas for patience are not helped by the fact Everton just demonstrated what a fresh(ish) face and change of voice can do for a squad low on confidence.
But is it really all Ange’s fault? Was it his predecessors’ fault, too?
Tottenham have had top-six revenues and wage bills for a quarter of a century but still only won one trophy, the 2008 League Cup, during that time.
Where they have led the way, though, is on executive pay. Year after year, Tottenham chairman Daniel Levy tops that ranking. The 62-year-old, who joined the board in December 2000, gave himself a pay package worth £6.5million ($7.9m) last season, including a £3m bonus.
Daniel Levy cuts a glum figure at Goodison Park (Michael Regan/Getty Images)
OK, during his reign, Tottenham have built a new training ground and the best stadium in the country, and the club now boast soaring revenues (mainly thanks to that stadium). But he has also burned through 11 permanent managers, run up record levels of debt, posted financial losses for the last four years and sparked rows with his most loyal customers about ticket prices and concessions.
Maybe the problem is not whoever is in the dugout, it’s the bloke who keeps hiring and firing them?
Chairmen do not sack themselves, of course, particularly when they own big stakes in the business. But Levy had a front-row seat in the directors’ box at Goodison Park so he cannot have missed the “Levy Out” chants from the away end.
Levy runs Tottenham because he owns a third of the investment firm, ENIC, which owns the club. But Joe Lewis, his partner at ENIC, is now 87 and has passed his shares in the business to a family trust. And, for the last year, the Lewis family, who have always been open to offers, have actively been looking for a buyer for their stake.
Perhaps it is time for Levy to realise it is time for him to cash in his chips and let someone else have a go, too.
GO DEEPER
Daniel Levy’s Tottenham are seeking on-field vindication and off-field change
Manchester United need to accept their place – and learn
As bad as Manchester United have been at times this season, they are very unlikely to be relegated.
So, no, Ruben Amorim, the team you have chosen to manage is not the worst in the club’s history — United have been relegated five times in their history, so that is at least five sides this lot are better than.
But we all know what Amorim is getting at, don’t we?
Three wins in their last 10 league games, four defeats in five at home, 13th in the table, seven points behind 10th-placed Fulham.
But what do we expect? That is exactly where you would expect to find a team that Brighton beat home and away, lose at West Ham and Wolves and get thumped, at home, by Bournemouth. They even lost to Spurs.
Ruben Amorim did not pull his punches on Manchester United after their latest defeat (Stu Forster/Getty Images)
Manchester United are bang average. Actually, Fulham are average, so they are not even that good.
Now we have cleared that up, let’s focus on how they might snap out of this slumber.
Well, for starters, they could take a good hard look at Brighton, a team that have spent most of their history in the third tier of English football but have recently become part of the Premier League furniture thanks to clear leadership, targeted investment and smart recruitment.
Obviously, Manchester United should have greater ambitions than a comfortable existence in English football’s top tier but some humility would not go amiss at the moment, which means acknowledging that the likes of Brighton are better than them right now, on and off the pitch.
Amorim is not to blame for this state of affairs but he is partly responsible for fixing it. He needs help from above, of course, and it is at that level where the improvement is most needed. Sir Jim Ratcliffe may only have been in overall control for a year but so far the gap between mission statements and tangible results is stark.
In contrast, Brighton’s owner Tony Bloom barely says a word publicly. He does not need to, we can all see the results.
Anyone know where an underperforming giant might find their next coach?
I know this one!
In fact, so does everyone else who has been paying attention to what has been happening 90 miles west of Brighton for the last season and a half.
When Bournemouth’s new owner Bill Foley replaced the popular Gary O’Neil with Andoni Iraola in the summer of 2023, the consensus view was “what are you doing?”
O’Neil led Bournemouth to Premier League survival on the back of five wins in seven games, including crucial victories over the club’s relegation rivals.
But having made his fortune in financial services, Foley is an underlying numbers guy. He knew that the unheralded guy who had made unfashionable Rayo Vallecano a tough opponent for every team in La Liga was a better bet.
Nine winless league games into last season, that bet looked like a bust. But then Bournemouth beat Burnley and everything started to make sense. By the end of the season, Bournemouth had 12 more league wins and had climbed to 12th, with a record points haul.
That record is unlikely to last long, though, as Bournemouth’s 4-1 win over Newcastle United on Saturday was their 10th in 22 league games and took them to seventh in the table. But this was no ordinary away win.
Newcastle went into the game as favourites. One, they had won nine straight games. Two, in Alexander Isak they had the hottest striker in the country. And three, Bournemouth were missing 10 players through injury.
Faced with those odds, Iraola laughed and said words to the effect of “we attack at dawn” (almost literally, as the coaches taking Bournemouth’s fans on the 350-mile trip north left at 2am).
Andoni Iraola is a coveted coaching talent (George Wood/Getty Images)
With nine youngsters on the bench and central midfielder Lewis Cook at right-back, Iraola told his players to stick to their hard-running, high-pressing, up-tempo game and blitz Newcastle from the off. By the time Justin Kluivert scored the first of his three goals in the sixth minute, they should have been two up already.
Kluivert, whose famous dad Patrick once played for Newcastle, obviously got most of the post-match plaudits, but Ryan Christie and David Brooks were immense in midfield, Dean Huijsen and Illia Zabarnyi faultless in the heart of defence and what a player left-back Milos Kerkez is.
Earlier this season, I passed on some praise to Foley from a director of football at a rival club. The latter had said Bournemouth were worrying him “because they look like they know what they’re doing”.
“I’d rather they think we don’t know what we’re doing,” replied Foley.
Sorry, Bill, the secret is out. Iraola, and many of your players, are brilliant.
Coming up this week
- We complete this weekend’s menu with a game between two sides badly in need of points but for very different reasons. Chelsea, the hosts, have not won in the league for a month and have been sucked into a scrap for Champions League football next season, while Wolves are fighting for league survival.
- After a month on a diet of domestic games only, European competition returns on Tuesday, with big helpings of Champions League and Europa League football. Top-of-the-table Liverpool host Lille on Tuesday, with Aston Villa visiting Monaco.
- The pick of Wednesday’s fare is Paris Saint-Germain versus Manchester City but not for the reason most would have predicted a few months ago, as this game is between the 25th and 22nd best teams in the Champions League so far this season. A defeat for either would leave that team with major Fear Of Missing Out. Arsenal, third in the rankings, have no such concerns ahead of the visit of Dinamo Zagreb.
- Thursday, as everyone knows, is Europa League day, but this week’s best game is no afterthought as it is a “Battle of Britain” between Manchester United and Rangers. Tottenham will travel in hope to Hoffenheim. And if cross-border clashes, with a North American flavour, are your thing, there is a cracker in League One: Wrexham v Birmingham City.
(Top photo: Getty Images)
Maybe you woke up this morning haunted by the first four lines of W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — or tickled by its tongue-in-cheek handling of existential dread. (Not ringing any bells? Click here to begin the Poetry Challenge).
This is a love poem. Perhaps that seems like an obvious thing to say about a poem with “Loving” in its title, but there isn’t much romance in the opening stanza.
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Ada Limón, poet
Nonetheless, the poem soon makes clear that love is very much on its mind.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
David Sedaris, writer
The polished informality gives the impression of a decidedly cerebral speaker — someone who’s looking at love philosophically, thinking about how it works and what it means.
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Musing this way — arguing in this fashion — he stands in a long line of playful, thoughtful poetic lovers going back at least to the 16th century. He sounds a bit like Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd:
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
Auden’s poem, like Marlowe’s, is written in four-beat lines:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Josh Radnor, actor
And it features strong end rhymes:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Samantha Harvey, writer
These tetrameter couplets represent a long-established poetic love language. Not too serious or sappy, but with room for both earnestness and whimsy. And even for professions of the opposite of love, as in this nursery rhyme, adapted from a 17th-century epigram:
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell
The reason why I cannot tell.
But this I know and know full well
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
There is some of this anti-love spirit in Auden’s poem too, but it mainly follows a general rule of love poetry: The person speaking is usually the more loving one.
This makes sense. To write a poem requires effort, art, inspiration. To speak in verse is to tease, to cajole, to seduce, all actions that suggest an excess of desire. That’s why it’s conventional to refer to the “I” in a poem like this as the Lover and the “you” as the Beloved. The line “Let the more loving one be me” could summarize a lot of the love poetry of the last few thousand years.
But who, in this case, is the beloved? This isn’t a poem to the stars, but about them. Or maybe a poem that uses the stars as a conceit and our complicated feelings about them as a screen for other difficult emotions.
What the stars have to do with love is a tricky question. The answer may just be that the poem assumes a relationship and then plays with the implications of its assumption.
This kind of play also has a long history. Since love is both abstract and susceptible to cliché, poets are eager to liken it to everything else under the sun: birds, bees, planets, stars, the movement of the tides and the cycle of the seasons. Andrew Marvell’s “Definition of Love,” from the 1600s, wraps its ardor in math:
As lines, so loves oblique may well
Themselves in every angle greet;
But ours so truly parallel,
Though infinite, can never meet.
The literary term for this is wit. The formidable 18th-century English wordsmith Samuel Johnson defined a type of wit as “a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” “The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together,” he wrote; that kind of conceptual discord defines “The More Loving One.”
The second stanza is, when you think about it, a perfect non sequitur. A hypothetical, general question is asked:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Mary Roach, writer
The answer is a personal declaration that is moving because it doesn’t seem to apply only or primarily to stars:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tim Egan, writer
Does this disjunction make it easier or harder to remember? Either way, these couplets start to reveal just how curious this poem is. We might find ourselves curious about who wrote them, and whom he might have loved. Tomorrow we’ll get to know Auden and his work a little better.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the second stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
Literature
Oedipa Maas from ‘The Crying of Lot 49’ (1966) by Thomas Pynchon
“The unforgettable, cartoonish protagonist of this unusually short novel is a California housewife accidentally turned private investigator and literary interpreter, and the mystery she’s attempting to solve — or, more specifically, the conspiracy she stumbles upon — is nothing less than capitalism itself,” says Ngai, 54. “As Oedipa traces connections between various crackpots, the novel highlights the peculiarly asocial sociality of postwar U.S. society, which gets figured as a network of alienations.”
Sula Peace from ‘Sula’ (1973) by Toni Morrison
“Sula arguably begins to disappear as soon as she’s introduced — despite the fact that the novel bears her name. Other characters die quickly, or are noticeably flat. This raises the politically charged question of who gets to ‘develop’ or be a protagonist in American novels and who doesn’t. The novel’s unusual character system is part of its meditation on anti-Black racism and historical violence.”
The speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ (1964) by Frank O’Hara
“Lyric poems are fundamentally different from narrative fiction in part because they have speakers as opposed to narrators. Perhaps it’s a stretch to nominate the speaker of ‘Lunch Poems’ as a main character, but this book changed things by highlighting the centrality of queer counterpublics to U.S. culture as a whole, and by exploring the joys and risks of everyday intimacy with strangers therein.”
This interview has been edited and condensed.
More in Literature
See the rest of the issue
Let’s memorize a poem! Not because it’s good for us or because we think we should, but because it’s fun, a mental challenge with a solid aesthetic reward. You can amuse yourself, impress your friends and maybe discover that your way of thinking about the world — or even, as you’ll see, the universe — has shifted a bit.
Over the next five days, we’ll look closely at a great poem by one of our favorite poets, and we’ll have games, readings and lots of encouragement to help you learn it by heart. Some of you know how this works: Last year more Times readers than we could count memorized a jaunty 18-line recap of an all-night ferry ride. (If you missed that adventure, it’s not too late to embark. The ticket is still valid.)
This time, we’re training our telescopes on W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One” — a clever, compact meditation on love, disappointment and the night sky.
Here’s the first of its four stanzas, read for us by Matthew McConaughey:
The More Loving One
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
Matthew McConaughey, actor and poet
In four short lines we get a brisk, cynical tour of the universe: hell and the heavens, people and animals, coldness and cruelty. Commonplace observations — that the stars are distant; that life can be dangerous — are wound into a charming, provocative insight. The tone is conversational, mixing decorum and mild profanity in a manner that makes it a pleasure to keep reading.
Here’s Tracy K. Smith, a former U.S. poet laureate, with the second stanza:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Tracy K. Smith, poet
These lines abruptly shift the focus from astronomy to love, from the universal to the personal. Imagine how it would feel if the stars had massive, unrequited crushes on us! The speaker, couching his skepticism in a coy, hypothetical question, seems certain that we wouldn’t like this at all.
This certainty leads him to a remarkable confession, a moment of startling vulnerability. The poem’s title, “The More Loving One,” is restated with sweet, disarming frankness. Our friend is wearing his heart on his well-tailored sleeve.
The poem could end right there: two stanzas, point and counterpoint, about how we appreciate the stars in spite of their indifference because we would rather love than be loved.
But the third stanza takes it all back. Here’s Alison Bechdel reading it:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Alison Bechdel, graphic novelist
The speaker downgrades his foolish devotion to qualified admiration. No sooner has he established himself as “the more loving one” than he gives us — and perhaps himself — reason to doubt his ardor. He likes the stars fine, he guesses, but not so much as to think about them when they aren’t around.
The fourth and final stanza, read by Yiyun Li, takes this disenchantment even further:
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
Yiyun Li, author
Wounded defiance gives way to a more rueful, resigned state of mind. If the universe were to snuff out its lights entirely, the speaker reckons he would find beauty in the void. A starless sky would make him just as happy.
Though perhaps, like so many spurned lovers before and after, he protests a little too much. Every fan of popular music knows that a song about how you don’t care that your baby left you is usually saying the opposite.
The last line puts a brave face on heartbreak.
So there you have it. In just 16 lines, this poem manages to be somber and funny, transparent and elusive. But there’s more to it than that. There is, for one thing, a voice — a thinking, feeling person behind those lines.
When he wrote “The More Loving One,” in the 1950s, Wystan Hugh Auden was among the most beloved writers in the English-speaking world. Before this week is over there will be more to say about Auden, but like most poets he would have preferred that we give our primary attention to the poem.
Its structure is straightforward and ingenious. Each of the four stanzas is virtually a poem unto itself — a complete thought expressed in one or two sentences tied up in a neat pair of couplets. Every quatrain is a concise, witty observation: what literary scholars call an epigram.
This makes the work of memorization seem less daunting. We can take “The More Loving One” one epigram at a time, marvelling at how the four add up to something stranger, deeper and more complex than might first appear.
So let’s go back to the beginning and try to memorize that insouciant, knowing first stanza. Below you’ll find a game we made to get you started. Give it a shot, and come back tomorrow for more!
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your first task: Learn the first four lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet. Fill in the rhyming words.
Monday
Love, the cosmos and everything in between, all in 16 lines.
Tuesday (Available tomorrow)
What’s love got to do with it?
Wednesday (Available April 22)
How to write about love? Be a little heartsick (and the best poet of your time).
Thursday (Available April 23)
Are we alone in the universe? Does it matter?
Friday (Available April 24)
You did it! You’re a star.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
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