There was a time, not that long ago really, when Tottenham Hotspur were synonymous with frugality, on the pitch at any rate. The criticism of the club, and foremost on their erstwhile chairman Daniel Levy, was that they had money but wouldn’t spend it. Cash-rich. ‘Ambition’-poor.
That is a tougher argument to square now. Tottenham are spending big. For some time,
the only player they’d ever committed a guaranteed fee in excess of £50 million
for was Tanguy Ndombele, who joined from Lyon in 2019. But with these latest
recruits, they will have spent over £50m on five separate transfers in a year.
Even by the standards of modern English football,
Tottenham’s outlay is eyebrow-raising. Inside the first three weeks of the
summer window, they have committed a reported £230 million on three signings.
Add unreported agent fees and the Premier League’s transfer levy of four per
cent on every incoming transfer, and their splurge tops a quarter of a billion
pounds. The club’s single-season record is £272.2m (in 2023-24).
Big spending is hardly new in the Premier League, but seeing
it unfold at Tottenham rather jars with the club’s recent on-pitch malaise. For
a time, there was genuine concern, even expectation in some quarters, that they
could be in the 2026-27 Championship. Relegation was no distant possibility; at
one stage it was knocking at the door, holding a scythe.
Champions League money will have helped pay the bills last
season, but the greater factor has been a shift in strategy at the top of the
club. After two decades of parsimony, ENIC, the firm that holds a majority
ownership stake in Spurs, is now pumping funds in.
Spurs took on almost £900 million in external debt to build
their world-class stadium in the second half of the 2010s, but since then,
external funding has arrived from shareholders. That began in 2022 but has
ratcheted up more recently. Following a £100m share issue last month,
ENIC, and principally the Lewis family, who own the company, have provided
£235m cash in 18 months.
That was the second £100 million injection inside a year, and
Tottenham also brought forward a big chunk of Premier League monies last
September, ostensibly to meet cash flow needs.
Selling the art collection
It may be that more funding from the Lewises is needed. The
family’s ability to do so at least looks assured; 12 days following the June
£100m injection, an auction of items from the family’s art collection
raised nearly £300m at Sotheby’s (reports the New York Times) a London record
for the sale of artworks from a single owner.
Even Del Boy came nowhere near this sum.
Fans of other clubs might also wonder how Spurs can afford
this activity while remaining within football’s financial rules. Yet a relative
lack of liquidity (at least prior to ENIC’s funding) bears little relevance to
compliance, with football’s regulations previously focused on keeping losses
low and, now, trained on how much clubs spend on their squads.
The losses at Tottenham have rocketed in recent seasons,
though much of that owes to a huge depreciation charge on the stadium — an
expense which is deducted from loss-based calculations. They have dipped into
underlying deficits too, but those are not so large that they’ll have trouble
with the Premier League’s profitability and sustainability rules (PSR), which,
in any case, will cease to operate once clubs are assessed on the recently
ended 2025-26 season.
The likelihood is Tottenham will aim to stay under UEFA’s
stricter 70 per cent limit — whereby clubs can only spend 70 per cent of
turnover plus averaged player profits on player and coaching wages, amortised
transfer fees and agent fees — but even at that lower level, they have scope
for manoeuvre.
Much to their supporters’ chagrin, Spurs have routinely
operated one of the lowest wages-to-revenue figures in both English and
European football. In 2024-25, a season
where they were without Champions League football, just 45 per cent of revenue
went on total wages. The amount spent on players, relevant for SCR purposes, is
even lower. Clubs don’t release player wage details but, per a UEFA report in
2022-23, Tottenham’s player wages were just 32 per cent of turnover.
This former frugality helps as the owners wake up, smell the
coffee and start to splash the cash.
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