Back to the Premier League Newsfeed

Crass power play of shaming Premier League stars into pay cuts will take an age to heal... football will not forget how the likes of Daniel Levy and Mike Ashley have acted in this crisis

As he wanders the grounds of his Hertfordshire estate today, imagining maybe that members of the Spurs ground staff might be tending his lawns, weeding his flowerbeds and trimming his privet, it is to be hoped that the Tottenham chairman, Daniel Levy, has worked out that throwing his players under the bus by trying to shame them into taking pay cuts did not work out so well.

Much has been made of the intransigence of Premier League stars in the argument about wages over the last seven days but the truth is that they were on the verge of agreeing cost-saving measures that would have helped their clubs until the Premier League alienated them with a self-righteous, self-entitled presentation on the now infamous conference call with club captains eight days ago.