By “Investigator”
There are five Premier League clubs that have grounds that hold over 60,000:
- Old Tafford. Manchester United: 74,197. Naming rights are being discussed, and the Sun (not the most reputable of sources, I know) recently quoted the naming rights being for sale at around £2 billion
- Unnamed Stadium. Tottenham Hotspur: 62,850 capacity. No companies known to be interested.
- London Stadium. West Ham United. 62,500. Allianz said to be interested but worried about relegation and negative publicity over some fans demanding a move out of the ground.
- Anfield. Liverpool. 61,276. Club planning to sell the name of each part of the ground separately to different companies.
- Emirates Stadium. Arsenal. 60,704. The naming deal runs to 2028.
Now we might perhaps reasonably assume that since capacity has two benefits (more income for the club, and more noisy support from the fans) these clubs with big grounds, might be doing rather well both in the Premier League and in terms of pulling in sponsorship. Which is true for three of the five.
But the two clubs not doing so well on their new grounds are also the clubs that haven’t paid for their new grounds. The cost of the West Ham stadium after the Olympics was £300m – all paid by those of us who honourably cough up the tax that the state demands of us from our earnings and pensions. WHAM pay just £2.5m a year in rent!
The Tottenham stadium was developed with a grant of just under a third of a billion pounds from the government, and it is rumoured that this has to be paid back if a ground sponsor is found – although I certainly haven’t seen proof of that. But Tottenham are demanding enough from sponsorship of the stadium to cover the government grant repayments, which seems a bit excessive. But I stress, no proof of that.
So what links the two new stadia that clubs have not paid for in full is the fact that neither club is doing very well in the league, and neither of them has been able to attract a ground sponsor. Here’s the table bottom…
| Team | P | W | D | L | F | A | GD | Pts | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 17 | Tottenham Hotspur | 31 | 7 | 9 | 15 | 40 | 50 | -10 | 30 |
| 18 | West Ham United | 31 | 7 | 8 | 16 | 36 | 57 | -21 | 29 |
| 19 | Burnley | 31 | 4 | 8 | 19 | 33 | 61 | -28 | 20 |
| 20 | Wolverhampton Wanderers | 31 | 3 | 8 | 20 | 24 | 54 | -30 | 17 |
One of the particularly interesting things about Tottenham this season is the rather strange way that they now handle bad news (of which they seem to have a lot). Many clubs and businesses face bad news that they have to handle, and indeed, there are expert individuals and PR companies who specialise in such issues.
And indeed expertise is needed at such a time, because simply ignoring the bad news and trying to run positive stories when everyone knows things are going wrong, rarely works. Those who look at league tables, for example, get the fuller picture.
Now I really want to stress big time that I am not a financial expert, and if I have got some of this wrong, I apologise in advance and will apologise again when I get the right details. But in essence, it looks to me as if Tottenham’s stadium is primarily being paid for through a combination of long-term loans and club revenue.
Which is why they urgently need success, because sponsors don’t like paying top money to be associated with a club that is slipping down the league, being booed by their own “fans”, and bringing in a new manager every month or two. And such events will also ultimately make club revenue decline.
Moving over to West Ham in 2022 the BBC revealed that the club “contributed an extra payment of just £185,000 for using the Olympic Stadium last season, despite enjoying a European cup run which earned them more than £12m.”
Of course, if that is the deal Boris Johnson offered the club, they can hardly be blamed for taking it. But worse, it seems that they don’t have to pay any more, even if they ever get into European competitions or make millions in prize money. Reports instead suggest the state is funding the West Ham stadium to the tune of around £10m a year. The club’s annual rent is reported to be around £3m a year. It has a 99-year lease, and it pays no extra rent even when it gets extra TV coverage when it does well.
This ludicrous situation has arisen because the UK government that ran the Olympics knew that they would be slaughtered if the ground remained empty afterwards, so they offered it to WHAM at a very low price. Thus West Ham pay a fraction of the cost of the upkeep of the stadium while London rate payers and UK tax payers, pay the rest.
So to come back to the question – why don’t WHAM and the Tots have a full-blown sponsor? WHAM probably doesn’t need one as it already has the financial deal of the century, and sponsors are wary of being associated with any suggestion of government finance..
For Tottenham, it all went wrong as Joe Lewis was found guilty of insider trading and sent to prison. The fact that President Trump then pardoned Lewis didn’t actually help the image of Tottenham, and I’m told there is a reluctance now to work with the club following such associations. But of course, I have no proof.
So here we have two big London clubs, sinking down the league table, each associated with some financial dealings that might be called “somewhat unusual”, and each unable to get a sponsor. And worse, one of them might go down this summer. Indeed, it is not beyond the bounds that both of them could go down.
Yet here’s the thing: why do so many newspapers actively avoid commenting on the fact that neither West Ham nor the Tots have got a sponsor for the ground? Maybe they think us football supporters are all far too thick to understand financial issues. Certainly, I am not a financial expert, and I may have got something wrong here (if so please write in and correct me), but on the surface, some of this looks a bit weird.
