Thirteen years or so ago, give or take a year, when Tottenham Hotspur were moldering around the Champions League places but were known as a team that underpaid and underfunded its playing squad, the Carty Free chat channel had a favorite phrase that we were keen to use. Various users, including myself, would throw a “SELL A PAINTING, JOE” in all-caps and sometimes bold type. After all, Joe Lewis was a billionaire with a huge art collection. Surely he could sell a piece of artwork that he no longer
liked or wanted and funnel that money into Spurs’ summer war chest! Maybe, just maybe, that’d be enough to afford… Nile Ranger?
Today, Daniel Levy’s legacy is the giant modern stadium, still the best in the UK and among the best in Europe, that virtually prints money. And yet, here we are again — a report this morning in football.london says that, after two consecutive 17th place finishes and a near relegation this season, the Lewis family are planning to invest significant funds into the club to improve it and get Spurs back up the table where it, presumably, belongs.
Not coincidentally, they’re also planning to sell some artwork. I’m sure the two are not at all connected.
London-based auction house Sotheby’s has announced an upcoming exhibition and art auction titled “Masterpieces from the Lewis Collection”. The exhibition will be open to the public from June 10 through June 23, and an auction of the displayed pieces will be held afterwards. The exhibition and sale will include pieces by such artists as Edgar Degas, Francis Bacon, Egon Schiele, Amedeo Modigliani, Gustave Caillebotte, and Lucian Freud. But the real draw is a painting by Austrian art nouveau pioneer Gustav Klimt, which is valued at £30m on its own.
The press release by Sotheby’s about the exhibition and auction describes the collection as follows:
“This summer in London, alongside our various-owner auctions, Sotheby’s will stage a landmark exhibition and sale of masterpieces from the renowned Lewis Collection. Estimated in the region of £200 million, this will be the most valuable single-owner collection ever offered at auction in Europe, bringing together defining masterpieces of modern figurative painting.
Assembled over decades by Joe Lewis and his daughter Vivienne, many of the works in the collection have been exhibited in major museums across the globe – a testament to their exceptional art historical significance – and many have not been seen on the open market for decades, if at all.“
Football.London says that the Sotheby’s exhibition and sale is not linked to the Lewis Family’s plans to heavily invest in Tottenham Hotspur football club, and in a sense that’s probably true — money, after all, is famously fungible and can be used to purchase and sell all sorts of goods and services, and can be moved around with impunity to obscure or focus on various different things. If the billionaire family which is planning to invest funds into their football club says with a straight face that the income from the sale of their artwork isn’t connected to their expenditures in other parts of their investment portfolio, well, who am I to say otherwise? I’m certainly not a finance guy, so sure, perhaps you can’t draw a perfectly straight line between the shuffling around of money between various investments.
In that sense, the title of this article nicely meets Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, and I’m perfectly fine with that. The Lewis family is hoping to raise upwards of £200m from the sale of their apparently unwanted artworks. Meanwhile, Spurs have brought in, unofficially, two players on free transfers, are targeting big-money moves for Brazilian winger Savinho and defender Jan Paul van Hecke, and are linked to numerous other players, some with very high transfer values.
So the art sale is a coincidence? Could be. Sure does seem suspicious, though, doesn’t it? Do not look at the woman behind the curtain.
Despite our exhortations during the early Redknapp era, there’s something a little grim about a billionaire family selling Klimt paintings to finance the purchase of a 22-year-old Brazilian winger. On the other hand, it’s not our money and billionaires plowing huge funds into sports clubs could be considered a better outcome than what we’ve seen a lot of other billionaires doing with their money over the past decade or so. There is an irony, however, in seeing Tottenham Hotspur owners with a surname Lewis (ostensibly) finally opening their pocketbooks and selling paintings to fund their sports team investment at a time when the club likely has more money than it ever has before. The me from 13 years ago would probably be very annoyed at this. The me of today just wants us to finish higher than 17th next season.
