How Joe Lewis transformed Tottenham Hotspur

We are now less than one year away from the Paris Olympics, with the world’s best athletes grinding away in preparation for the quadrennial sporting spectacle. In athletics, Kenyan distance running phenom Faith Kipyegon has set three world records this year, and in swimming this week, Frenchman Léon Marchand just obliterated the last standing world record by the most decorated Olympian of all time, Michael Phelps.

With his megawatt smile and medal potential, 21-year-old Marchand is already expected to be one of the faces of the Paris games. In the biggest development of the week, French luxury conglomerate LVMH has signed on as a partner sponsor of the 2024 event, providing not only much-needed funds to the Paris Olympic organising budget, but medals designed by Parisian jeweller Chaumet, hospitality by Moët Hennessy, and much more. Marchand will be the first of a select group of athletes to receive “direct support” from Europe’s largest company by market value.

The value of the LVMH sponsorship, months in the making, is estimated at €150mn, according to a person familiar with the matter. That is a needed chunk of change as the total cost of staging the Games has more than doubled from its original estimate of €4.4bn to roughly €8.8bn. Paris joins a long list of recent Olympic hosts with ballooning staging costs, though the French capital is still working to sign on additional sponsors. With less than a year to go, the Paris Olympics finance department — much like its athletes — need to be optimising for peak performance.

In the meantime, the opposite of peak performance may be Joe Lewis, the billionaire best known for his ownership of Tottenham Hotspur, who this week was charged in the US on allegations of insider trading. We take a look at the tumultuous changes in the business of football since the Bahamas-based tycoon bought the club.

Do read on — Sara Germano, US sports business correspondent

How Joe Lewis transformed Tottenham Hotspur

Allegations of insider trading against Joe Lewis didn’t just make the financial pages. That’s because even with a 98-metre yacht and an art collection full of Picasso and Matisse, the Bahamas-based billionaire is best known for owning Tottenham Hotspur for more than two decades.

The English football club is a mainstay in the English Premier League, has a hateful rivalry with Arsenal FC, and relies heavily on England captain Harry Kane for goals.

Lewis, who was released on a $300mn bond secured by his yacht and private plane after entering a not guilty plea in New York, survived tumultuous changes in the business of football over two decades.

From the mega-rich Russian Roman Abramovich’s acquisition of Chelsea in 2003, which turned the west London side into world beaters, to Spurs’ role in the failed attempt to set up a breakaway European Super League in 2021, Lewis has seen it all.

With multi-club ownership now back in vogue, Spurs chair Daniel Levy and Lewis were ahead of the game in the 1990s and 2000s, when they owned stakes in teams across Europe, including Scotland’s Rangers, Czech Republic’s Slavia Prague, and AEK Athens of Greece. Even then, multi-club ownership raised concerns.

Born in an east London pub in 1937, Lewis now looks like a rare breed in a league where English owners are outnumbered by foreigners, ranging from US private equity types to sovereign wealth funds.

The tycoon officially gave up control of Spurs in October 2022, handing responsibility to a pair of Bahamas-based administrators at the helm of a trust that controls ENIC, the company that owns more than 86 per cent of the club’s shares.

Unspecified Lewis family members are “potential beneficiaries” of the trust but not the man himself. Until that change last October, Lewis was the longest-serving Premier League owner.

Tottenham’s stance is that the charges against Lewis are “a legal matter unconnected with the club”.

But should Lewis’s run-in with the law reignite takeover interest from investors, he and Levy, the potential beneficiary of separate trusts that own nearly 30 per cent of ENIC, have built a club with a reputation for careful financial management.

In the decade to 2021/22, no Premier League club made a higher pre-tax profit than Spurs’ £203mn, according to football finance analyst SwissRamble, although fans complain at the lack of trophies on the pitch.

Spurs’ revenue totalled £48mn the year before Lewis bought the club, with 46 per cent coming from ticket sales and 25 per cent from television. In 2021/22, the club’s revenue amounted to £444mn, more than nine times higher, with nearly a third coming from TV and less than a quarter from match receipts.

Part of that can be explained by the exponential increase in the value of the Premier League’s broadcast rights. The League reported revenue of £244mn in the year ended July 2000. In the 2022 fiscal year, that figure had smashed through the £3bn mark.

It’s also down to the construction of a longer-term asset. The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, completed in 2019 at a cost of more than £1bn, hasn’t just increased Spurs’ match day revenue; it’s a modern arena that hosts NFL games and music concerts too.

In February, Spurs struck a 15-year partnership with Formula One, the car racing series, to bring karting to the stadium, another drive to make money even when the club isn’t playing home matches.

The Lewis family’s intentions are anyone’s guess, but the Spurs trust has an asset that’s worth keeping. Or selling.

Women’s football revolution: behind the scenes at Barcelona Femení

As the Fifa World Cup clocks record attendances and ticket sales, why not go behind the scenes at Barcelona Femení, the top club in Europe and holders of the Uefa Women’s Champions League.

Featuring interviews with top players Marta Torrejón and England midfielder Keira Walsh, as well as Barcelona Femení sports director Markel Zubizarreta, the FT and Scoreboard chart the growing professionalisation of women’s football.

“I started playing football without knowing the big stars, without even knowing there was a Champions League, that nowadays I would be able to make a living,” says Torrejón. “It has changed a lot.”

Walsh, who won Euro 2022 with England, said it was a “no brainer” to join Barcelona after her success at international level.

“It’s a football culture. It’s not just about a men’s and women’s team. They just love football,” Walsh says. “You see people with [teammates] Alexia’s shirt, Aitana’s shirt over men’s players’ shirts. And for me, you know, that’s such a massive thing to see now with women’s football going forward.”

And take note of the words of ex-footballer Karen Carney, who recently led a review of women’s football on behalf of the UK government and made recommendations to grow the game. Her bet is that the game is a start-up business that will pay off for those brave enough to invest now.

With the right facilities, improved pay for players, opportunity, better slots on television and media, says Carney, sponsors will put more money into women’s football and kick off a “virtuous cycle”.

“But,” warns Carney, “there’s still this taboo around women’s sport and women’s football. ‘Oh, it’s going to cost.’”

“Well, everything does, but I’m telling you, you’ll get it back.”

This video speaks for itself. Watch it here.

Highlights

• India has emerged as a cricket powerhouse, not only for its innovative playing style but the billions in revenues pouring into the sport and its broadcasting rights. The FT’s South Asia correspondent, Ben Parkin, dispatches on the emergence of Indian cricket as a force to be reckoned with.

• With the World Cup under way, Simon Kuper examines the gender imbalance in the management of women’s football, which is still overwhelmingly male.

• Saudi football club Al Hilal approached Qatar-owned Paris Saint-Germain with a €300mn bid to buy out Kylian Mbappé. The record-breaking bid for the French forward underlines how the oil-rich kingdom is ripping up the balance of power in the sport.

• In Opinion, former Harvard Business School researcher Sinead O’Sullivan maps out the investment case for women’s sport.

• Investors all over the world are buying into padel, a racket sport that’s challenging tennis for the hearts of hobbyists and professionals. Scoreboard’s own Josh Noble digs into what’s behind the momentum that has attracted the interest of the Qatari state and the New York Yankees baseball empire.

Final Out

In baseball, triple plays are exceedingly rare, averaging fewer of five plays per season in nearly 150 years of top division pro ball in the US. The elusive play requires the fielding team to catch or tag three players from the batting team for an out on a single play, which ends the inning.

The Atlanta Braves did just that on Tuesday, shutting down the third inning against the Boston Red Sox with a shallow catch by centre fielder Michael Harris II, who turned the ball to first baseman Matt Olson for a second out, who then flipped the ball to third baseman Austin Riley to complete the play. That sequence — from centrefield to first base to third — is known as an 8-3-5 triple play, which hasn’t been executed in Major League Baseball since 1884.