Up For Sale ?

  • The Fighting Cock is a forum for fans of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. Here you can discuss Spurs latest matches, our squad, tactics and any transfer news surrounding the club. Registration gives you access to all our forums (including 'Off Topic' discussion) and removes most of the adverts (you can remove them all via an account upgrade). You're here now, you might as well...

    Get involved!

Latest Spurs videos from Sky Sports

Sort by date Sort by reaction score
Something has obviously been thrown into the works here, I doubt it's the steel works though - I thought they had agreed to sell up- and the final nod had been given by the government.
It's likely that Levy and Co need to do some maths on the cost of spending a season elsewhere. I'd take the bottom and middle tiers at Wembley for home games if push came to shove, but the notion of sharing with MK Dons or Brighton is a joke.
Still, yet another issue drags on, ironically the issue that will see us properly challenge the top 4 sides in our league barring a sugar daddy.
:levystare:
 
I wouldn't be surprised if our sale coincides with upcoming Premier League television deals. The current BT and Sky deal has brought unprecedented profits to the clubs and my guess is that when the deal expires in 2016, the next one will be even more substantial. That's just the domestic money as well.

In 2013, NBC sports got the American rights for $250m for three years. Many thought this was a massive overpay as Fox had previously just paid $23m for the previous rights. But then this happened, "A record 31.5 million Americans tuned in to NBC Sports Group’s 2013-14 Premier League coverage – more than doubling the 13.3 million who watched last season on ESPN, ESPN2 and Fox Soccer, according to The Nielsen Company." EPL viewership sets several American records for 2013-2014 season - Awful Announcing

It's a pretty safe bet that with the help of a World Cup bump that American viewership should continue to increase and make the current success story even more impressive. ESPN has already talked about trying to get back in on the EPL, it should be a giant bidding war. I wouldn't be surprised to see the rights number triple up to somewhere around $750 million or even more.

But what does this have to do with the sale of Spurs? Well if you look at the NBA for comparison—which is a decently solid comparable considering basketball is now behind football as the world's second most popular sport and also it has a huge international fanbase— you'll see that in the past couple of years there have been some massive team sales. The most high profile of which being the Los Angeles Clippers for 2 billion dollars, who actually share some comparisons to Spurs in that they are in a very desirable and high profile city but aren't as successful or marketable as the team they share the city with. The Clippers were a strange situation due to the removal of the racist owner but even in a normal situation they would have went for fuckton of cash. Also, the Milwaukee Bucks which are basically the NBA's Hull City in that it is in a small not profitable city with not a particularly large fanbase broke the sale record before the Clippers being sold for $550 million.

Anyway, the reason for these huge sales is largely due to the fact that the next TV deal is already being discussed in hushed tones about how huge it could be. There was some absurd stuff going around how Google might buy the rights etc. This week it broke that the NBA is in talks to almost quintuple their rights from ESPN and Turner Sports, going from $450 million a year to over 2 billion per season.

My guess is that if the American market continues to grow this season television wise you might start to hear some absurd talk about the next EPL TV deal. If that happens, it becomes the perfect time for ENIC to sell. You want to sell before the TV deal is finalized because investors love the idea that they are getting in on something huge and how it theoretically could be a massive number. Once the TV money numbers come out—even if they are ridiculous— it tempers the excitement because it puts on a known quantity on it.

If ENIC can get everything cleared up with the stadium project, we have a solid year, and the potential for a massive increase in the TV deal is still looming you could see a lot of groups interested in the potential massive profits of the EPL lining up. Also worth noting, there's almost a zero percent chance of Abramovich, Mansour, the Glazers, or Henry selling and if Woolwich were to sell it's hard to see it going anywhere besides their current minority owner Usamov. We would be the best team on the market, by far. Even if Kenwright were to try to sell Everton they aren't in our league infrastructure wise plus we have the advantage of being in the city where rich people want to live and hang out.

The most attractive club on the market (read: bidding war)+the potential for the Premier League to become an even more dominant financial powerhouse in 2016; Tottenham could end up selling for a crooked number. £1 billion seems high, but if we get our ducks in a row I wouldn't be surprised if ENIC got close to that.
 
JDK JDK

I think your right, the number will be somewhere close to the billion mark.
one important distinction to make though, the US sports model and the European one are miles apart. The epl is perhaps the bridge between the two but as of yet, no owners barring maybe the glaziers could ever hope to pull money out of the club, profiting only when selling. The whole money driven franchise bullshit you get in the states I think is going even a little bit far for a gentrified EPL. Could see us more likely being sold to a cashed up billionaire rather than a company for instance..
 
OZHotspur said:
JDK JDK

I think your right, the number will be somewhere close to the billion mark.
one important distinction to make though, the US sports model and the European one are miles apart. The epl is perhaps the bridge between the two but as of yet, no owners barring maybe the glaziers could ever hope to pull money out of the club, profiting only when selling. The whole money driven franchise bullshit you get in the states I think is going even a little bit far for a gentrified EPL. Could see us more likely being sold to a cashed up billionaire rather than a company for instance..
Click to expand...

Not looking forward to the US model coming to the EPL but it is already starting to sink in. The continued growth in TV money is what will truly flip it in that direction. There are plenty of cashed up billionaires who own American sports teams, they just don't have the same power to throw around money like Abramovich and Mansour due to salary caps and limits on what you can pay players.

Also, isn't the idea that EPL teams aren't displaying extreme franchise tendencies only true in a nostalgic sense? Besides being old and ingrained in communities what is really non-franchise like about EPL clubs nowadays? There's plenty of American "franchises" that are old and heavily important locally as well. I hate the way sports business is going, it is disgusting in America in so many cases I could rant about it all night. But what are Premier League teams doing that is so different? It's sad that that is the case but...
 
JDK JDK

I totally agree..
I don't think the American sports model, is the model because its somehow specific to American culture etc..
I think it is just more evolved in the way it operates.
no doubt I see the epl going this way in the future, though it may take a few decades more.
Our potential move to the Olympic stadium is further proof of the 'franchise' type bs creeping into the EPL.
I think with the FFP also the transfer fee's which send clubs broke, but also seem to stop big team owners pulling profit out of the clubs, will change the scenery further, potentiaslly by attracting big business to a new money making scheme..
all in all though, id rather a cashed up billionaire aka abramovich than say the blokes who bought Liverpool..say what you want about him but at least the bloke is passionate, rather than some faceless fucking suits that want to add our club to their sporting portfolio..
 
Last edited:
This is an insightful and great exchange, JDK JDK and OZHotspur OZHotspur . I would particularly tend to agree with JDK that that the EPL is on the brink, at a tipping point. The global money is about to come flooding in, spearheaded by the U.S. Whether that is good for Spurs, or for the league as a whole, there is plenty of room for debate, and concern. For better or worse, change is definitely on the horizon.
 
Last edited:
I would not want our club sold to a bunch of bent oil rich Arabs who are not using their own money anyway or one of Putin's lackies, like Abramovich. One of the cartels could be good , they could eliminate our opposition and offer free Peruvian marching dust with every membership sold.!
 
OZHotspur said:
JDK JDK

I think your right, the number will be somewhere close to the billion mark.
one important distinction to make though, the US sports model and the European one are miles apart. The epl is perhaps the bridge between the two but as of yet, no owners barring maybe the glaziers could ever hope to pull money out of the club, profiting only when selling. The whole money driven franchise bullshit you get in the states I think is going even a little bit far for a gentrified EPL. Could see us more likely being sold to a cashed up billionaire rather than a company for instance..
Click to expand...

I think the FFP rules make football a lot more interesting to people looking to make money from it.....They actually have a law that excuses them from the club's losing money, any fan questions about why there is no outside investment are much easier to answer "oh we'd love to, but uefa says we must make a profit"
 
Blanchflower said:
I think the FFP rules make football a lot more interesting to people looking to make money from it.....They actually have a law that excuses them from the club's losing money, any fan questions about why there is no outside investment are much easier to answer "oh we'd love to, but uefa says we must make a profit"
Click to expand...

i did mention this in a post after the post you quoted.
FFP will make clubs more profitable, esp the big ones as it allows them to spend much less on transfer fee's, which in most cases is there 2nd biggest expense..
 
Louisiana Hotspur said:
This is an insightful and great exchange, JDK JDK and OZHotspur OZHotspur . I would particularly tend to agree with JDK that that the EPL is on the brink, at a tipping point. The global money is about to come flooding in, spearheaded by the U.S. Whether that is good for Spurs, or for the league as a whole, there is plenty of room for debate, and concern. For better or worse, change is definitely on the horizon.
Click to expand...
US tv money could potentially make a huge difference to some but not all clubs. The deal that the UFC signed with Fox a few years ago changed a rapidly growing and ambitious company into a huge behemoth. The popularity of football seems to have shot up in the States after the world cup and the fact that us and few other clubs all did summer tours out there shows that it is going to have a big role in the future of our sport. The premier league is a very marketable product with a global fan base. I wouldn't be surprised if the league had suggested to the club's to go over there. I am not saying that it is a bad thing. Football is big business and to stay in a good, dominant position you have to expand into different areas. It is inevitable that we will be sold at some point. I think we will more likely be sold to someone from the States as we have a high profile over there.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom