Allegations of insider trading against Joe Lewis didn’t just make the financial pages. That’s because even with a 98-metre yacht and an art collection full of Picasso and Matisse, the Bahamas-based billionaire is best known for owning Tottenham Hotspur for more than two decades.
He acquired it from one time market trader Alan Sugar, noted
for his remark about how money put into football was like prune juice. Sugar wasn’t sophisticated, but he was
street smart.
Lewis, who was released on a $300mn bond secured by his
yacht and private plane after entering a not guilty plea in New York,
survived big changes in the business of football over two decades.
With multi-club ownership now back in vogue, Spurs
chair Daniel Levy and Lewis were ahead of the game in the 1990s and 2000s, when
they owned stakes in teams across Europe, including Scotland’s Rangers, Czech
Republic’s Slavia Prague, and AEK Athens of Greece. Even then, multi-club
ownership raised concerns.
Born in an east London pub in 1937, Lewis now looks like
a rare breed in a league where English owners are outnumbered by foreigners,
ranging from US private equity types to sovereign wealth funds.
The tycoon officially gave up control of Spurs in October
2022, handing responsibility to a pair of Bahamas-based administrators at the
helm of a trust that controls ENIC, the company that owns more than 86 per cent
of the club’s shares.
Unspecified Lewis family members are “potential
beneficiaries” of the trust but not the man himself. Until that change last
October, Lewis was the longest-serving Premier League owner.
Tottenham’s stance is that the charges against Lewis are “a
legal matter unconnected with the club”.
But should Lewis’s run-in with the law reignite takeover
interest from investors, he and Levy, the potential beneficiary of separate
trusts that own nearly 30 per cent of ENIC, have built a club with a reputation
for careful financial management, arguably at the expense of the trophy cabinet.
In the decade to 2021/22, no Premier League club made a
higher pre-tax profit than Spurs’ £203mn, according to football finance analyst
Swiss Ramble, although fans complain at the lack of trophies on the pitch.
Spurs’ revenue totalled £48mn the year before Lewis bought
the club, with 46 per cent coming from ticket sales and 25 per cent from
television. In 2021/22, the club’s revenue amounted to £444mn, more than nine
times higher, with nearly a third coming from TV and less than a quarter from
match receipts.
Part of that can be explained by the exponential increase in
the value of the Premier League’s broadcast rights. The League reported revenue
of £244mn in the year ended July 2000. In the 2022 fiscal year, that figure had
smashed through the £3bn mark.
It’s also down to the construction of a longer-term asset.
The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, completed in 2019 at a cost of more than £1bn,
hasn’t just increased Spurs’ match day revenue; it’s a modern arena that hosts
NFL games and music concerts too.
In February, Spurs struck a 15-year partnership with Formula
One, the car racing series, to bring karting to the stadium, another drive to
make money even when the club isn’t playing home matches.
The Lewis family’s intentions are anyone’s guess, but the
Spurs trust has an asset that’s worth keeping. Or selling. Fans would just like to see some silverware.
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