But thats a nonsense statement because we didn't, did we.
You might just as well say had we not won the Double in 61 Bill Nicholson would have been an average manager.
Or if we hadn't won a Major European trophy and two FA cups in the 80s it would have been a shit decade.
It's not about what might have happened, it's about what did happen.
And we just went through a complete decade without a major trophy for the first time since WW2, while simultaneously recording the highest profit margin in the clubs history.
Surely you can understand the paradox there and why some fans are uncomfortable with it?
It's not a statement - just a hypothetical question. I don't think it makes a difference to 'how the club has been run', which is my point.
The lack of cups I would mostly put blame on the players and managers.
Everton, Portsmouth and Wigan have managed to lift the FA cup more recently than us (outside the big boys) but that's still only 3 teams in 28 years. Their 'below par' players and managers were capable of a magic cup run that we weren't. And for the majority of that time, we haven't been a 'big boy', so a plucky cup run was the best we could hope for like those clubs - going off the old reputation of Spurs being a 'cup team'.
More recently we have been in that higher category of clubs that you could expect to be one of the usual cup lifting suspects - yet have failed to do so. Poch has been pretty vocal on his lack of ambition to win a domestic cup, so he fields rotated teams with players lacking minutes until the later stages. So you can argue - its the poor squad depth that Levy is responsible for and to a certain extent I would agree. But lets look at the FA cup last season;
Dumped out 2-0 away to Palace. Rotated team with a Premier league fixture 3 days later. This was our staring 11.
Gazzaniga - 1 mil?
Foyth - 10 mil?
Sanchez - 40 mil?
Vertonghen - 12 mil?
Trippier - 4mil?
Skipp - Academy
Dier - 5 mil?
Walker-Peters - Academy
Moura - 25 mil?
N'Koudou - 10mil?
Llorente - 12mil?
That's over 100 million worth of players with 2 academy products, failing to win at Selhurst Park.
From my perspective that's not the fault of the owners. You could blame recruitment, scouting, manager, youth coaches, players themselves - but I simply do not blame Levy or Lewis. They had the tools at their disposal to get further than Palace away in the 4th round.
The season before, it was a very poor Utd in the semi. That might be the most deflated I have ever left a football stadium - I think because Dele gave us the lead, the place erupted like never before, and we fucked it up. The man that can't be criticised (Dembele) fucked up. We played Vorm, but that's no excuse for registering 2 shots on target in the entire game, with Eriksen, Dele, Son and Kane all starting.
How could you blame Levy for that? United had been fucking awful until that game, when their players rose to the occasion.
The inability to compete for the Premier league - blame is more easily attributed to the men upstairs as I feel that we would have had to have been spending at the rates of Chelsea, City, Utd to have a strong enough 25 man squad. Which brings me full circle really - what we have been building with this 'project' is allowing us to compete at their level, or at least a lot closer to it.
I'm not hating on Poch by the way. I think it's more to do with an ingrained sense of being at a failure club that rubs off on the players. We need to break that with 1 decent cup win - then I believe we will be flying.