The truth about £5bn Tottenham takeover as Daniel Levy files official paperwork, £775m issue key

The truth about £5bn Tottenham takeover as Daniel Levy files official paperwork, £775m issue key

Daniel Levy has a habit of pricing himself and Tottenham out of the best deals, be that new signings or commercial partners. With fresh investment in the crosshairs, that trait is an issue for Spurs.

“He has got so close so many times,” one source who has worked as a sponsorship consultant for several Premier League clubs told TBR Football, talking about the search for a naming rights partner for the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, which has now gone unbranded for almost six years.

“He was trying for £25m. I’ve spoken to a lot of clubs that aren’t grounded in reality a lot of the time. Their justification for the price they’re asking is simply: ‘That’s what the chairman wants.’“

As it happens, Spurs themselves say they are in no hurry to secure a branding deal for the stadium, Daniel Levy’s magnum opus in his now nearly 25 years as chairman of the North London club. The brand benefits of having their name above the board when Beyonce or the NFL come to town are, the club’s commercial department say, enough to compensate for the missed revenue opportunity.

And yes, brand-building is important. The majority of bedrock Tottenham fans are probably sick of hearing it, but it’s commercial income which, under ENIC’s self-funding model, pays for transfers and player wages. And since their last season at White Hart Lane, commercial income has almost quadrupled, while wages have nearly doubled and transfer debt – astonishingly – has risen almost 500 per cent.

But could it be that this impulse to extract maximum value even at the expense of leaving immediate revenues on the table has cost Tottenham in their attempts to smoke out new investors?

In their financial statements for 2022-23, which were published last April, Levy revealed that he had enlisted the financial services firm Rothschild & Co to broker a “significant increase in our equity base.”

‘To capitalise on our long-term potential, to continue to invest in the teams and undertake future capital projects, the Club requires a significant increase in its equity base. The Board and its advisors, Rothschild & Co, are in discussions with prospective investors. Any recommended investment proposal would require the support of the Club’s shareholders.’

Daniel Levy, April 2024

But despite persistent early links to Nasser Al-Khelaifi’s Qatar Sports Investments, Amanda Staveley’s PCP Capital Partners and several American private equity firms, the trail has since gone cold – and there was no mention of fundraising in Spurs’ most recent set of accounts.

Tottenham’s semi-miraculous qualification for the revamped, ultra-lucrative 36-team Champions League in 2024–25 may have eased any immediate pressure for fresh investment. But even with UEFA prize money now guaranteed, ENIC may still have to do the one thing they hate the most: spend their own cash. And that’s not a situation they want to be in.

The question in the meantime remains – is Levy’s intransigence on price costing Spurs?

Whose equity is Daniel Levy selling?

Tottenham’s ownership structure isn’t as simple as it looks on paper. So whose chunk of the club is the chairman actually trying to sell?

Well, maybe no-one’s. The board could issue fresh shares to a new investor at a set price, with the money paid then going to the club’s bank account, not Levy or ENIC’s

That would dilute Levy’s own stake of around 26 per cent, as well as the 61 per cent shareholding now presided over by the family trust of Joe Lewis, who stepped back from the club following his charges and subsequent conviction for insider trading in 2023.

The Lewis family trust is overseen by Katie Booth and Peter Charrington, two vastly experienced legal professionals based in the Bahamas. Charrington joined the Tottenham board as a non-executive director in March this year. The pair are listed as persons of significant control at Tottenham on Companies House.

Officially, any decision on the issuance of new shares would be signed off by the board of directors, who in turn can be appointed and removed by Booth and Charrington, essentially making them the gatekeepers of new shares, acting on behalf of the Lewis family trust.

The view among football finance experts and industry sources consulted by TBR Football, however, is that it is far more likely that ENIC or Levy are looking to realise some of the value of their initial investment between 2001 and 2007, which totalled around £90m. As we’ll explore later, it will be quite some markup.

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