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Daniel Levy - Chairman

Finney Is Back said:
That is prize money allocated directly from UEFA though..... What about the additional ticket revenue from the (big) games? What about the fact that our sponsorship deals have grown as a direct consequence of becoming considered a 'CL' team? How interested in us do you think the big corporations would be with us bumbling along in the Europa League?
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So you really think we made an extra £200m from tickets and sponsorship deals???
Have we even signed one sponsorship deal of note outside of Cinch? I haven't seen any figures for that, but it's only a few million a year
and started this year.
 
billyiddo said:
It's not what I think it's what I'm pretty sure you have argued in the past.

Why do you assume an overspend btw, rather than say paying down more of the build early on reducing the size of the loan required?
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Perhaps I am getting early onset dementia or something then?.... Though I really can't see how I would ever argue that our club would agree to playing staff bonuses that negated any financial benefit of playing in the Champions League?... It would be like me agreeing a contract with one of my traders to receive 100% of the profit on their deals.... I think Levy is a very clever man so I would never assume he would do anything so stupid.

I assume overspend as I don't think we planned to arrive in the stadium with a debt as big as we had.... let alone an even bigger one than that as it would've had to have been without operating at (virtually) zero net spend despite income growing by more than expected.

We also arranged a draw down facility of £450 million from a consortium of 3 Banks that was supposed to cover the remaining cost of the build. My thoughts are that this was our actual budget (plus the considerable funds that had already been sunk in by then).
 
Finney Is Back said:
Perhaps I am getting early onset dementia or something then?.... Though I really can't see how I would ever argue that our club would agree to playing staff bonuses that negated any financial benefit of playing in the Champions League?... It would be like me agreeing a contract with one of my traders to receive 400% of the profit on their deals.... I think Levy is a very clever man so I would never assume he would do anything so stupid.

I assume overspend as I don't think we planned to arrive in the stadium with a debt as big as we had.... let alone an even bigger one than that as it would've had to have been without operating at (virtually) zero net spend despite income growing by more than expected.

We also arranged a draw down facility of £450 million from a consortium of 3 Banks that was supposed to cover the remaining cost of the build. My thoughts are that this was our actual budget (plus the considerable funds that had already been sunk in by then).
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I'm losing track of things here - the 450m draw down facility + whatever we had sunk in in cash at that point is what you have decided represents our budget for the build - is that correct? And you think we spent an additional 400m on top of that as 100% of our CL revenue wasn't spent anywhere else and had to be allocated to the build as well?

We participated in the CL in years 16/17 17/18 18/19 19/20, with the 637m final refinancing of our debt coming in Sept 2019, so we can discount the 19/20 CL money from being spent on the stadium as it came way after the event and we can discount the 18/19 money too as that preceeded the summer transfer spend that saw us sign Ndombele/Lo Celso/Sessegnon and Clarke.
 
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DubSpur said:
So you really think we made an extra £200m from tickets and sponsorship deals???
Have we even signed one sponsorship deal of note outside of Cinch? I haven't seen any figures for that, but it's only a few million a year
and started this year.
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Sponsorship and corporate was static in 2015 and 2016 accounts (our final two years in the Europa League) In both of those years we brought in: £48.9m.
The trajectory was then as follows:
2017 - £57.4m
2018 - £93.7m
2019 - 120.3m
2020 - 146.5m

Of course a decent portion of that is driven through corporate seats but sponsorship deals make up the biggest portion and we now have sponsorship deals that are commensurate with us being considered a CL club. Unfortunately we can only speculate as to what the demand for corporate seats would've been had we continued to bounce around the Europa League.

I don't think it is a stretch to say that our exploits in the CL have resulted in us gaining close to £200 million in additional funds from this revenue stream alone however.

Fingers crossed we will be back in the CL when renewals come round for our various corporate offerings, otherwise we might see that income stream fall a little.
 
billyiddo said:
I'm losing track of things here - the 450m draw down facility + whatever we had sunk in in cash at that point is what you have decided represents our budget for the build - is that correct? And you think we spent an additional 400m on top of that as 400% of our CL revenue wasn't spent anywhere else and had to be allocated to the build as well?
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I don't know what the budget for the build was. Levy was clever to never disclose it. My point is that we made a very large portion of unforecast funds through better than expected results on the pitch. Those additional funds were not spent on the team and they did not see us build up large cash reserves. Therefore (unless we think ENIC are squirreling money out of the club - which I absolutely don't think by the way) that money was ploughed into the stadium. Ergo either:

1. We actually planned to have a much bigger debt and we entered the stadium with a smaller than expected debt (I think the size of the original drawdown facility probably indicates that this wasn't the case.
or
2. We went over budget on the stadium and poured in the unforecast additional revenues to cover the overspend (most likely IMO)
or
3. Our financial planning actually had us achieving 4 straight CL finishes and massively growing our prize money and sponsorship deals due to this (Again, I believe Levy to be a very clever man so don't think he would've based financial planning on that.
 
I'd say the majority of that was from being at Wembley and then the new stadium. Another area we can only speculate.
 
Edit my previous post :
We participated in the CL in years 16/17 17/18 18/19 19/20, with the 637m final refinancing of our debt coming in Sept 2019, so we can discount the 19/20 CL money from being spent on the stadium as it came way after the event and we can discount the 18/19 money too as that preceeded the summer transfer spend that saw us sign Ndombele/Lo Celso/Sessegnon and Clarke.

Your 400m overspend numbers just don't really stack up in my eyes - a big part of your reasoning for arriving at that figure is the 400m revenue from the CL that we supposedly earned, but from what @DubSpur says about the yearly revenue being closer to 40-50m and the above regarding what was earned before the final loan refinancing it seems that we arriveat a figure closer to 100m (revenue from 2 x CL campaigns) which is quite the drop and that's before we even get on to who or what is responsible. Plenty of reports about how the Brexit vote and decrease in value of the £ saw costs rise considerably at that time...
 
You know things are going well for the genius midget prick when one of the few stars we've had in 20 years goes on radio and tells the world, "Spurs’ ambitions right now are at a standstill," says Ginola, before I assume jokingly suggests he'd play for west ham in champions league.
 
Finney Is Back said:
I don’t have a ‘dim’ view of Levy. I think he is an ‘OK’ chairman. He does what he thinks is best for this club. Gets some things right and some things wrong. I would absolutely like him to put somebody in place between him and the manager as I think his decisions on first team matters are often poor, but think the club is at least in safe hands under his stewardship (which is a bold thing to say in some ways with us carrying by far the biggest debt in British football probably the biggest ever?)

I have simply drawn a logical conclusion that the stadium went a long way over budget for the reasons that MKSpur outlined above. I think Levy is a clever man (he must be to have a 1st glass degree from Cambridge) so his plan would never have been to arrive in that stadium £1billion in debt with £300m of revenue (as the case would’ve been without Poch’s 4 CL qualifications).

I must confess that I hadn’t considered MKs other option that he just chose to make the stadium better than planned by instead spending the transfer budget on the stadium. I hope that didn’t happen as that would probably have stopped us winning some titles for the sake of bells and whistles.

Of course we’ll never know exactly how much over budget we went on the stadium as Levy was very careful (and clever) to never put a number into the public domain.

I still think the stadium will be a huge asset for us for a long while, irrespective of the overspend and am very grateful to Levy for committing to it and driving it through. I just think that a few less bells and whistles with (some) of the significant money earned by Poch and the team reinvested back into the team would’ve achieved the right balance.

The CEO of a company should never get a free pass if a capital project costs a lot more than anticipated. ‘Well they always do’ is not a sensible response to this happening. For example I believe that Arsenal’s Emirates stadium was completed on time (and I think also on budget).

As things stand the club has a very large debt that we will need to reduce. I actually do trust Levy to reduce that debt (it will make his and Lewis’ stake in the club worth more so I’m sure club funds will be found to pay this off). I just hope that the right balance is found between investment in the team and paying off the capital. As Levy is a clever man I hope he has also learned that no matter how good your manager (and we clearly had a diamond) virtually zero net investment into the playing squad will see you go backwards. I also hope that next time (assuming there is one) we have a manager that has got us to the cusp of challenging for one of the really big trophies that manager is backed in terms of doing all that can be done to bring in his number 1 targets so we’ve done everything possible to do what football clubs should be aiming to do.... and that is win trophies, not grow balance sheets.
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Tell me some of the figures you know then tell me why some of your analysis is incorrect.
 
Wow you guys (Billyiddo and Finney) have written a LOT of posts on this thread... do you have jobs?

From what I recall, Levy spent more than he first planned to upgrade the "dining experiences" etc which he probably reasoned (a) were needed to make the stadium truly iconic and (b) would pay off via selling Loge seats for big bucks for 10 years or whatever, prior to the pandemic.

Remember also that during the build we had Brexit which made the price of raw materials increase.
And the fire alarm system didn't work properly so we ended up redoing the whole thing and spending longer at Wembley than planned.

And overall Levy had an eye on the repayments over 20 years e.g. whatever sum he wanted to borrow, it depended mostly on the terms of the repayments... he wanted to pay back £Xm per year so if the interest rate was low, he could spend more on the stadium and vice versa.
 
The deal with Wembley was extraordinarily good. Someone in the FA told me Daniel took them to the cleaners and back again.........He is deal maker extraordinaire - but more advice on the player investment side is surely needed.
 
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