The saga of Spurs owners

Alan Sugar acquired Tottenham Hotspur in 1991.  He was born in a council house in east London, left school at 16 and sold car aerials out of a van. He called that business Amstrad, as in Alan Michael Sugar Trading. By the mid-1980s, Amstrad was listed on the London Stock Exchange and Sugar had moved on to a full range of consumer electronics. In 1991, he beat media baron and infamous fraudster Robert Maxwell in a takeover battle for Spurs.

Sugar’s time in charge is best remembered for his rows with managers, flashy signings and observation that money goes through clubs like prune juice, “in one end and out the other”. But he was instrumental in making sure Sky Sports got the media rights to the “new” league, which was handy as Amstrad made satellite dishes.

In 2001, he sold a chunk of Spurs to British investment firm ENIC  with the rest of his shares going in the same direction six years later.

They were the first club to test their worth on the stock market, are also still owned by English investors but their ownership structure is complicated.

British investment firm ENIC owns almost 87 per cent, with the rest shared between 30,000 fans, most of whom will have had the shares in their families for decades.

ENIC’s stake is split 70/30 between the family trust of Joe Lewis, another self-made man from east London, and his protege Daniel Levy. Lewis — 87 and worth more than £5billion, according to The Sunday Times — used to own the stake himself but a combination of his age and recent legal difficulties appear to have persuaded him and his family to conduct some sensible estate management. Meanwhile, Lewis’ children seem to have come to the same conclusion as so many other club chairmen’s children: maybe it is time to do something else with the family fortune.

Whether the 62-year-old Levy, one of the best-paid executives in football, feels the same is a topic of much debate in merger and acquisition circles. Rothschild is testing the market on ENIC’s behalf, so we shall see, but even Levy knows Spurs need a leg up if they are to retain their invites to the big events – and stop being ‘Spursy’ to the irritation of their fans.