Remember when Tottenham Hotspur was the financially stable club that bootstrapped its way from a mid-table team to one of the richest clubs in world football by sustainably living within its means? Well, it’s not that anymore. Just months after the children of former Tottenham owner Joe Lewis ousted Daniel Levy in a palace coup and injected £200m into the club’s operating budget, today we have news that the Lewis Kids have pumped another £120m into the club.
This reporting comes from Football.London’s
Alasdair Gold, who writes that the Lewises have now spent £320m over the past year into revamping Tottenham. It’s not clear exactly what the £120m will be used for, but considering money is fungible and can be used for practically anything club related it probably doesn’t matter.
The Lewises spending this amount of money has raised some eyebrows, mostly from people who are used to Spurs operating much differently under Levy, but while that is indeed a significant amount of cash to be injected by the owners of a football club, there doesn’t appear to be anything untoward about the way the money is being sourced or spent. This simply seems to be the Lewis family spending their inheritance from Joe, granted by a trust, in the family-owned football club.
Rich people spending their money on a pet project isn’t particularly unusual, it’s just that we’re not used to it happening here, at Tottenham Hotspur. It does raise the question as to whether the owners will continue this level of investment into Tottenham, or if they will eventually back off and let the stadium fund a more moderate future investment. I suspect we’ll see continued money pumping until the club completes its refresh and the club stabilizes into one that can once again compete for top four, but we’ll see.
