Daniel Levy has confirmed he is open to selling a stake in Tottenham Hotspur. The Tottenham chairman is believed to value the club at about £4 billion and would consider selling up to 25 per cent. At the start of the year he met Nasser Al-Khelaifi, the president of Paris Saint-Germain and chairman of Qatar Sports Investments, and Spurs was subject to interest from the private equity fund MSP Sports Capital, among other interests in recent years.
Levy and his family own a 29.88 per cent stake in Enic, the
investment company which owns 86.58 per cent of Tottenham. The remaining 13 per
cent is owned by 30,000 small shareholders.
Heavy financial investment in Newcastle United and Chelsea
in recent years has increased the competition that Tottenham face. Spurs posted
a net debt of £626 million in the latest company accounts, in part due to the
building of a stadium that cost £1 billion. Interest on the debt was £22.2
million in 2021-22, an outlay which will have risen with increases in interest
rates over the past year.
When the stadium was being built, Tottenham envisaged that
some of the repayments would be paid for by a naming-rights deal in addition to
income from hosting rugby matches, NFL games, boxing and music concerts, and a
planned karting track underneath the stadium.
Now Levy has suggested that finding a stadium sponsor is not
crucial, a year on from talks with Google and previously Uber, FedEx and
Amazon. “If we get the right naming-rights partner — and when I say that, I
mean somebody who pays the right money in the right sector — then we are
willing to consider doing it,” Levy said. “But we’re not as tied to doing it now
as perhaps we would have been when we first looked at building the stadium.”
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