- Tottenham Ho v Arsenal: how the two sides are doing of late
- The issue about sacking Arteta, changing the team, and sorting Arsenal once and for all
By Tony Attwood
I am sure we have all seen, over the years, differences between home and away performances by clubs, but I really can’t remember a Premier League club doing as badly at home as Tottenham while having more than reasonable performances away.
Indeed, in the last article, we saw that Tottenham had gained around twice as many points away from home as they have picked up at home. So what is the cause of this?
One cause must certainly be the quite reasonable angst, frustration and perhaps pure annoyance of their fans. They were promised the best stadium in the country – and it may well be that they got it, but that of course is no good if the club can’t deliver results. Yet as things stand, Tottenham have gained fractionally under twice as many points away from home as from games played at New WHL.
For any club, this is a disaster, for although waiting lists for season tickets can remain big, when fans stop renewing, and the waiting list declines the club is in real trouble, simply because their financial projections whcih underpinned their borrowing of funds to build the stadium, aren’t being met. Even the advertisers within the ground start demanding discounts.
Of course, I have no inside knowledge of the deals Tottenham made, but my experience of working in advertising (albeit as a copywriter, not a salesman) showed me that companies buying advertising will include all sorts of “what if” clauses in their contracts. Thus, there might be a firm price set for a video or display advertisement within the ground, but the price can be affected by the number of games played, the amount of TV coverage, and even performance in league and cup matches. In short, the better the club does, the better the image of the club, the more the advertising is worth, and so the more the club charges.
Thus, it is possible that a situation can be reached in which an international or national company which finds itself associated with a club with a poor home record, might well seek to exercise its right to cancel a deal, or if that is not in a contract, then at least sell the space on to another firm even if it is at a loss. No one wants to be associated with a declining entity – and that is what Tottenham at home is, at the moment.
Clubs, of course, work hard to avoid such situations via the terms and conditions in the contract, but ultimately, there can be a balance between having a space that earns little money but with the advertiser tied in for years to come, and more money now but with the right of the advertiser to back out if the club does poorly.
The evidence of such difficulties is easy to see for Tottenham Hotspur have not been able to sell the naming rights to their stadium at the price they imagined they would get.
Arsenal were widely reported to have made £100m plus, through naming their ground the Emirates Stadium with multiple add-ons over the years. That is the sort of money Tottenham will have included when they announced the building of their new stadium…but it never happened.
One of the problems has undoubtedly been that while Arsenal have had a continuous record of being in the Champions League, Tottenham don’t have a record like that. In fact, in the last 15 or so years, they have only been in the Champions League five times, and that lack of exposure at the very top of the football pyramid dramatically reduces the value of naming a ground after a brand. For it is not just that a club not in the Champions League gets less exposure on TV around the world, it is also the fact that a club outside of the Champions League is perceived by many as not a major club. And so the income from advertising, naming rights etc becomes less and less.
Now, everyone working in advertising in terms of websites, magazines, TV and the like, is used to taking on deals which come in at low cost. They get a good deal and the TV company gets something where otherwise it would get nothing.
But with a football club, the naming rights usually last very many years so advertisers want as near certainty that the club with which they are associated is a success. It is reported that stadium naming rights for top clubs these days bring in around £300m a year, usually guaranteed for at least 10, and more likely 20 years.
I think Tottenham had built that sum into their financial projections in moving from WHL, and thus that is what they have lost out on each year since moving to what is still called the THS as it has been since they moved in, in 2019. And that is a very long time to go without that sort of expected income.
Of course, they might sell those right tomorrow – I have no inside info on this, but I am pretty sure that selling the naming rights within the first year of opening would have been part of their financial plan. Arsenal started to get £200m a year in naming rights when the current stadium opened, and that has risen ever since.
As I say, I have no inside info on all this, but if my suppositions and observations are right, there is a bit of a hole in Tottenham’s income at the moment. And having only won two games at home all season, isn’t helping very much.
