Lewis family inject cash into Spurs as they sell prestige art

The Lewis family have injected another £100 million ($132m) into Tottenham Hotspur.  The injection, via the purchase of new shares in ENIC Group Ltd., will provide fresh working capital for the club, rather than being specifically for the summer transfer market.  The investment is the fourth such equity injection in recent years, and is a similar mechanism to the investment of £100m last year.

Since May 2022, £332.5m in owner funding has flowed into the club.  That is a stark departure from the two decades prior. Then, net funding from ENIC totalled just £24.6m, with Spurs being run, to all intents and purposes, off its own back. Huge debt was taken on board to build the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, but the club was — and still is — required to service the payments.

Alongside the October injection, Spurs also pulled forward a reported £90m of its Premier League distributions in a factoring arrangement, whereby they received cash upfront from a lender in exchange for taking a haircut on the payments when the Premier League makes them. It is an arrangement employed fairly regularly elsewhere but never before at Spurs, and, alongside the ENIC money, spoke to a club in need of funds.

That stems from hefty operating costs and big recent transfer spending, which have in large part not translated to on-field success. Between the summer of 2019 and the end of last season, roughly £900m net has been spent on transfers.

At the end of June 2025, a net £243m was owed to other clubs even before £159m was spent last summer. Already this close season, £52m has gone on Van Hecke, and the free transfers of Robertson and Senesi were hardly small additions to a wage bill which has previously been held at a level south of England’s elite. Big money moves for Fernandes and Tonali have been mooted and would need to be funded.

With no Champions League football this coming season and Premier League earnings mired at the wrong end following two awful domestic showings, ENIC had a choice: invest to improve, or make do. The route selected should be of little surprise.

Family sells art

Four masterpieces of the “School of London” movement have come to light at auction, confirming years of rumours about the art collection of a British billionaire who grew up in poverty in the East End.

Two works by Lucian Freud, one by Francis Bacon and one by Leon Kossoff are to be sold by Joe Lewis, a currency trader whose family control Tottenham Hotspur. It is the first time Lewis, 89, who narrowly escaped a prison sentence two years ago after admitting insider trading, has identified himself as the vendor.

The pieces, with a combined estimate of nearly £30 million, are described as the “bedrock” of Lewis’s collection, which has spent much of the past three decades on his £98m superyacht, Aviva.

Oliver Barker, the chairman of Sotheby’s, said that identifying Lewis as the vendor pointed to the family’s pride in their ownership of works of “this kind of quality”. He said that Lewis, who was born above the Roman Arms pub in Bow, east London, and left school at 15 to join his father’s catering company, had felt an affinity with the artistic school associated with his birthplace and many of whose members had Jewish roots like himself.

Barker said that the sale was the “holy grail” for buyers because the pieces were “first-rate works with an absolutely first-rate provenance and which are completely fresh to market with modest estimates attached”.

Lewis’s children are thought to increasingly control the family’s businesses, and Barker confirmed that Vivienne, in particular, was a driving force in the family’s art collection. She was “extremely actively involved in the art scene”, he said, adding that the family were still buying works.