Daniel Levy's masterplan laid bare amid £3bn green light from Premier League HQ
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Few figures in the Premier League provoke mixed responses quite Tottenham chairman and co-owner Daniel Levy.
The 62-year-old Essex-born executive has presided over the most transformative era in Tottenham’s history, with the move to the new stadium in 2019 propelling the club into a new financial plateau.
On Daniel Levy’s watch, Spurs are now among the highest in Europe and their EBITDA, a metric used to evaluate the cash performance of a business, is expected to soar in the coming years.
To bedrock Spurs fans, however, this is just noise. To them, the only real performance market in football is achievements on the pitch, not in the balance sheet.
That coveted trophy continues to elude them, with the League Cup triumph in 2008 the last time a Spurs captain could be seen celebrating success on the podium.
There have been a few more misses since then – as detailed in the table below.
| Season | Competition | Outcome | Opponent | Score/Details |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2008-09 | EFL Cup (League Cup) | Lost in Final | Manchester United | 0-0 (AET, lost 4-1 on penalties) |
| 2014-15 | EFL Cup (League Cup) | Lost in Final | Chelsea | 2-0 |
| 2016-17 | Premier League | Finished 2nd | Chelsea | N/A (Chelsea won the league by 7 points) |
| 2018-19 | UEFA Champions League | Lost in Final | Liverpool | 2-0 |
| 2020-21 | EFL Cup (League Cup) | Lost in Final | Manchester City | 1-0 |
Levy and ENIC, who between them own just under 87 per cent of the club, are sometimes accused of holding Spurs back through their cost control.
The data shows that argument does hold water to an extent.
Tottenham’s squad cost (amortisation and wage bill) was 66 per cent of their total revenue in the last financial year. That was comfortably the lowest in the Premier League.
That restraint is partly why so many fans in N17 welcomed the news that Spurs are seeking minority investment, with Amanda Staveley among those to have been linked with a minority buy-in.
The hope is that the financier’s consortium’s capital can be used to take the handbrake off and bolster Ange Postecoglou and Johan Lange’s recruitment and retention budget.
Even with Levy’s infamous negotiation style taken into account, there is believed to be a great deal of interest in Spurs from investors in the United States and Middle East.
Their enterprise appeal is largely centred on how much they have diversified as a business.
And the latest news direct from Premier League HQ in recent days has hammered that point home.
Tottenham’s TV income to soar as Premier League enters new streaming era
In 2022-23, the last financial year on record, £208m of Spurs £550m revenue came from media sources – that’s the Premier League, FA, and UEFA’s TV deals.
Interestingly, that means they are tied with Liverpool as the club in the Premier League who are least reliant on media income as a proportion of their revenue.
That also means that, when the Premier League makes a big jump forward with the amount they pull in from broadcasting rights, no one benefits more than Spurs.
Why? Because although Spurs’ peers in the so-called Big Six all receive roughly equal broadcast monies, Spurs crowing non-media income gives them an advantage.
So when the Premier League revealed after its quarterly shareholder meeting last week that its TV rights will rise by 17 per cent to £12.25bn over the next cycle, a cheer will have gone up in Spurs’ boardroom.
Amana Staveley’s Tottenham investment plans: Premier League announcement could lead to Spurs value boom
News of the expanded TV pot was not the only significant item on the agenda at the shareholder meeting.
The Premier League has also now announced that it will take its international media rights in-house from 2026-27 onwards.
In layman’s terms, they will launch a pay per view or subscription streaming service which cuts out the middle man (overseas broadcasters) and is expected to multiply revenue.
Daniel Levy’s representative at the summit, which was dominated by Man City’s challenge to the league’s commercial rules, voted in favour as the motion passed unanimously.
Spurs are among the clubs who have explored selling the rights to their own competitive matches, just as they have done with pre-season tours in the past.
That was one of the conditions of the failed European Super League, which Levy and co supported.
The Premier League’s announcement about the in-house service is one step removed from that.
However, the likes of former Crystal Palace owner and talkSPORT’s resident football finance expert Simon Jordan has suggested it could one day quadruple revenues across the league.
That would be transformative for Spurs and their peers in the Premier League, potentially justifying the soaring enterprise values seen in the division.
It would also likely make clubs profitable in the long term, which would radically change the dynamic with regards to minority investments such as the one Staveley hopes to engineer in North London.
Minority investors don’t take a dividend and have relatively little control, which has led some in the industry to say that taking that sort of equity stake in a club is essentially a very expensive season ticket.
However, if clubs were profit-making it would open up the opportunity for them to pay minority investors, meaning they would not need an ‘out’ – i.e., someone else to sell their stake to.
