With a new Bond movie in cinemas, The Spoiler imagines which football personalities could double as the bad guy opposite 007

Jose Mourinho as Scaramanga (The Man With the Golden Gun)
Suave, vain, deluded… why, Jose is perfect to play the island-dwelling assassin with three nipples.

More villains below:

Gunners hoping to fill chief executive role with MLS man

Earlier this year, Arsenal welcomed Colorado Rapids owner Stan Kroenke to the board, and the club also appear to be poaching their new chief executive from the MLS.

Deputy Commissioner Ivan Gazidis (pictured above) joined the American league in 1994, two years before anyone had ever kicked a soccerball, and has been instrumental in developing the game in the big country.

According to the Daily Mail, the South African-born lawyer  - a known supporter of Game 39 - could be north London-bound:

Gazidis, an Oxford University football Blue, has the credentials for the Arsenal role, having joined the MLS in 1994 as part of their founding management team. Now he oversees all aspects of the competition, as well as being involved in running football organisation CONCACAF.

Arsenal will have a problem attracting Gazidis, whose proposed move to the Premier League with Manchester City fell through when he was reticent to relocate to England.

What should be a greater problem for the Gunners, however, is how much he looks like Daniel Levy…

Popular businessman shifts blame onto former manager

With Tottenham looking like they might survive another season in the Premier League, chairman Daniel Levy has today tried to exonerate himself from the club’s recent troubles, by blaming absolutely everything on pesky former manager Juande Ramos. Firstly, he claims he should have brought in Harry Redknapp eighteen months ago:

“I can’t give details but I’m sorry that, for whatever reason, we didn’t appoint Harry then.”It would be unfair of me to give details on the historical discussions with Harry.

“Perhaps we wouldn’t be in this position if we had.

“I hope he can be a top-four manager but he has never managed a top-four club so you are never going to know until, hopefully, we get there.

After Martin Jol’s dismissal, would a club with Big Four ambition and a chairman with a penchant for big name foreign managers really have been chasing Harry Redknapp? Really?

Riding on the wave of positive feelings in north London, Levy continued by claiming the sale of Dimitar Berbatov was also completely down to that hapless Spaniard:

“We would have kept Berbatov even

Ex-Spurs gaffer is philosophical about departure

After Daniel Levy published his epic love letter to Spurs fans on the official Tottenham website, Juande Ramos, an unemployed man from Spain, has issued a very brief response on his own site:

Despite the surprise sacking of the First Team Coaches just 15 hours before the match against Bolton, Juande states “the results are what counts in football and we all know how this world works. Now we just have to see if this decision is the best one for the team to recover and have a good season.”

For the past few weeks Juande has acted like a complete gent, and his lack of malice and apparent ongoing concern for the team is quite refreshing to see. Well played, señor.

(Still he might want to update the message on the front page of his website:  “This season our aim is to delight the thousands of Spurs fans, but my other personal aim is that you, my friends, also gain enjoyment from this passionate sport that unites us all.”)

Chairman pays homage to Ashley with 2,441-word statement

Daniel Levy has written a lengthy open letter on the club’s website in an attempt to explain to fans the thought process behind his recent decision-making.

Unlike Mike Ashley’s similar statement to Newcastle fans two months ago, Levy stops short of blaming himself for the problems and instead appears to list a number of reasons why everyone else has screwed up.

He explains that he sold Dimitar Berbatov on deadline day because under FIFA regulations they would have lost him for a pittance next summer, although he laughably adds that “he had not been a positive influence on the pitch or in the dressing room”, apparently deciding that his 46 goals and 22 assists had nothing to do with their fifth-placed finish in 2006-07 or their Carling Cup success.

Levy also adds that the “ultimate failure” was that “quite simply, we failed because we were not as decisive or as successful in identifying or replacing the two strikers as early as we should have been,” which appears to have been blamed on Damien Comolli. The letter also vowed that the club are not solely run to make a profit and revealed that new manager Harry Redknapp will have absolute control over transfers and that the sporting director role vacated by Comolli will not be filled.

Read the statement in all its glory after the jump:

Levy somehow manages to make things worse for Spurs…again!

Exactly a year to the day after Martin Jol was sacked as Tottenham manager, the club have announced the departures of manager Juande Ramos, assistant Gus Poyet, sporting director Damien Comolli and coach Marcos Alvarez.

The Jol sacking was abysmally timed, with almost everyone who attended the UEFA Cup home game against Getafe besides the Dutchman knowing that he had been axed, but the decision to dismiss the three most important members of the matchday staff just over fifteen hours before a hugely important home game against Bolton, who could climb nine point above Spurs with victory, may have trumped even that.

Poyet was expected by many fans to succeed Ramos but he has gone too, leaving development squad coach Clive Allen and youth team boss Alex Inglethorpe to take temporary charge. With the timing of the announcement it may prove the case that the players won’t even hear the news until the morning and if they are awake to hear the news now, it’s hard to imagine how they’ll manage to sleep on it.

An early favourite to take over as manager is former West Ham boss Alan Curbishley. It has been rumoured that he turned down the QPR job earlier today and the departure of Comolli means that he would not have to deal with a transfer supremo operating over his head, something that compromised his position at Upton Park.

The official Tottenham statement can be read after the jump:

No one guilty of passing the buck at White Hart Lane

Yesterday, Juande Ramos showed his willingness to take full responsibility for Tottenham’s current rubbishness, claiming the attitude of his players is still very good, and he is working hard to turn things around.

Today, however, Jonathan Woodgate threw a curveball into the arena of blame, by claiming it’s nothing to do with the Spaniard and everything to do with the players:

“The buck stops with the players.

“We’re bottom of the Premiership and it’s not nice at all. We’re hurting inside but we have to stand up and get ourselves out of this mess that we’ve got ourselves into.”

It’s great to see the players support the under-fire manager, although The Spoiler can’t help thinking they could do a lot more to support him on the pitch.

So, will we see Daniel Levy complete the circle of blame by accepting responsibility in tomorrow’s press?

Not bloody likely.

At Spurs, that is. He’s not dying or anything.

As Tottenham finished another performance where absolutely everything went wrong yesterday, chairman Daniel Levy was caught by the cameras chatting into his mobile. It’s possible that he was ordering a Dominos so it would be delivered when he got home, but that’s an incredibly risky strategy. What if there is traffic? The driver would take it back to the restaurant and then bring it back again cold - an undesirable situation for everyone involved. Perhaps it is more likely that Levy was ordering a managerial execution, much like he did at this time last year.

So, will Levy, Comolli and co hold their nerve and stick with the luckless Spaniard (seen above conducting an orchestra), or will they send out a P45 before we celebrate the birth of Father Christmas? Votes and comments below, please.

Spanish coach doing his absolute best to ensure Spurs win the Championship next season

The Spoiler has come into information that suggests Spurs fans are badly in denial when it comes to correctly apportioning responsibility for their unhappy start to the season. (The Spoiler has also been accused on more than one occasion of being anti-Tottenhamist, an accusation that has no basis in truth.) Various phone-ins and message boards have Spurs fans laying the blame squarely at the feet of Damien Comolli, who has indeed failed to dazzle in the transfer market, and Daniel Levy, for his “Take care of the pennies, and the players will take care of themselves” economic philosophy. Coach Juande Ramos has been given a pass for quietly getting on with a difficult job.

However, the news from the Spurs training ground indicates a very different situation, and that instead of trying to make a silk purse from a sow’s ear, Ramos is one step away from having the players bump into each to the accompaniment of comedy music.
According to our mole: “Juande came back from his (summer) holidays unhappy in London, and now seems hell-bent on doing all he can to induce his own sacking and pay-off.”

Why Ramos should take his vote of confidence with a pinch of salt

Tottenham have released a statement on their official website insisting that everything is fine and they would never in a million years consider replacing Juande Ramos with Mark Hughes.

The Club largely refrains from making statements of this nature unless absolutely necessary in order to set the record straight in light of wholly inaccurate reporting.

An article on the back page of this morning’s Sun newspaper reports that the Club has made an offer to Mark Hughes to take over as manager during the forthcoming international break.

This story is completely untrue and without foundation and the matter is being discussed with the publication.

Phew, that ends all that drama then! Or does it? The Spoiler has dug out a similar story on the club’s website from September 25 last year where they insist that Martin Jol’s job is safe, exactly a month before sacking him.

Normally we only have to remind fans