There has been plenty of interest in investing in
Tottenham Hotspur in recent years but no would-be investor has received the welcome Forrest Li got in December.
Not only was he Daniel Levy’s guest at a home game but Li was put up at the Tottenham training ground afterwards, and introduced to senior staff and players.
It was the full red-carpet treatment, more than Levy has put on for any other potential investor before. And it has got people at Tottenham wondering whether Li, one of the richest men in Singapore, could be about to become their new boss.
If Li wanted to buy Tottenham outright, the 44-year-old billionaire would have to get very, very close to what
the club’s current owners ENIC think it is worth, as the Bahamas-registered investment firm does not need to sell. That price tag is understood to be £3 billion: £2.3 billion for the shares, plus £700 million of debt.
While Li is rich enough to do that, he is more likely to start with a minority stake — £3 billion is a scary number for anyone to write on a cheque and even the biggest hitters tend to do these things in instalments. The staged investments in
Leeds United and
West Ham United are good recent examples of this trend.
A gradual divestment is an idea that ENIC founder Joe Lewis and his partner Levy have been considering for some time, strengthening the club’s finances while not ending their 21 years of control. But whatever happens between Li and ENIC — and we should point out that both sides have denied that they have discussed an investment, as is always the case even when there are talks — his apparent interest raises one of the most important questions around the club in recent years: are Tottenham Hotspur really for sale?
The answer to that depends on your definition of “for sale”. The club would certainly not describe themselves that way, and there is certainly no urgency to find a buyer or sell up. Levy is the longest-serving chairman in the
Premier League, and there is no suggestion that he is touting the club around.
But, at the same time, speak to any source familiar with Levy’s long-term thinking — and
The Athletic has spoken to many — and they will all say ENIC has built up Tottenham in order to one day sell it. And that Levy and Lewis have been willing to speak to prospective investors about a potential sale, although none have gone public with their interest since US bank Cain Hoy in 2014.
“It has always been a question of when,” says a source close to Levy and Lewis. “Daniel has said that he is building this to sell it. But there’s hardly a club in the Premier League that isn’t for sale at the right price.”
Another potential investor into Tottenham said that while the whole club might not be on the market, the sale of a minority stake, leaving Levy in charge, is in play at this point.
“It’s always been for sale,” says another well-placed source, “and Daniel has always been open to discussions.” (It is also worth pointing out that because Tottenham have shareholders that if any interested party does approach them, they are obliged to consider it.)
Some of those discussions have, in fact, come close to a deal. In 2019, for example, American businessman Todd Boehly, who also looked at
Chelsea, led a group that was in advanced negotiations to buy the club for approximately £2.3 billion, although no final agreement was reached.
One very experienced club broker told us “Spurs are 100 per cent for sale”, while another source, who has been involved in takeover talks with ENIC, said “they’re definitely more in play now than they have been”.
If Levy does want to talk turkey, he and Lewis would make a huge profit on their investment. Whatever fans might think about their management of the football side of the business, there is no question they have built Tottenham into something far more valuable than it was in 2000,
when they bought 29.9 per cent of the club from Alan Sugar for £22 million. That deal valued the club at £80 million.
How much more valuable it is now, though, is a matter of some debate. In his most recent survey of Premier League club valuations, the University of
Liverpool’s football finance expert Kieran Maguire gave Tottenham the top spot, at £2.7 billion. But early last year, global financial services firm KPMG put a price tag of £1.5 billion on the north London side, only for US business magazine Forbes to push that out to £1.7 billion in its annual ranking of football’s most valuable clubs a few months later.
How you value businesses as unusual as Premier League football clubs often comes down to who is selling and why, and who is buying and why. ENIC has been an active player in the football industry since the mid-1990s, so there is not much mystery there: Lewis and Levy will not sell unless someone makes them an offer they really like and any sale would be the culmination of more than 20 years’ work.
“We chose football,” Levy explained when ENIC first started buying stakes in clubs, “because it is the most popular sport on earth, and the biggest money-spinner.”
It is also more fun than investing in corporate bonds or unit trusts, which is why there will always be a line of wealthy people who want to buy a club like Tottenham, but right now Li seems to be at the front of the queue.
Born in China, the US-educated tech tycoon is the chairman and CEO of Sea, an e-commerce and gaming business based in Singapore but listed on the New York Stock Exchange, where it was doing very nicely until October. In April 2020, as the world entered lockdown, Sea’s shares were worth 42 cents each. A year and a half later, they peaked at $3.58, an increase of 750 per cent.
At that point, Li was worth north of $20 billion (£15 billion) but paper wealth can be fleeting and Sea’s share price has plummeted since November, when Chinese entertainment and technology conglomerate Tencent started to sell chunks of its large holding in the company. As of last week, Sea’s shares were trading for $1.28 and Forbes had adjusted Li’s “real-time net worth” to $7.5 billion (£5.6 billion).
No need to start a collection for him then, but we can reasonably wonder if Li’s window for buying some or all of Tottenham has slammed shut for the time being.
The Athletic is aware of other suitors, though, with the name of one prominent American family cropping up several times. We have asked this particular family if the rumours are true and they have strongly denied them, so, we will not name them now but we will be paying close attention to their next moves in the sport and entertainment space.
And they are not the only wealthy Americans with designs on European football, far from it. As already mentioned, Boehly’s name comes up in conversations about club takeovers every other month. He already owns a fifth of baseball’s Los Angeles Dodgers and more than a quarter of basketball’s LA Lakers.
One US-based source described Boehly, who studied at the London School of Economics, as a “sports nut who has more money than he knows what to with”.
But even aside from Boehly, Levy has held talks over the years with Robert Kraft, owner of the NFL’s New England Patriots and Stephen Ross of the Miami Dolphins, as well as Frank McCourt, who used to own the Dodgers and now owns Ligue 1 side Marseille. Although sources have denied these were about a potential sale, others say that these discussions could have simply been about other topics, such as sponsorship and partnership opportunities.
