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By Tony Attwood
There have long been suspicions that if Tottenham were to be relegated the biggest problem they would face would not be getting promoted the following season, but paying the interest on their debts with a much, much reduced income.
A report in the New York Times has focused on Tottenham’s current issues, and have noted that “Tottenham have gone from England’s most profitable and self-sustaining club to one where costs are racing past revenues and transfer debts have piled up.”
Now I didn’t know that Tottenham were “England’s most profitable and self-sustaining club” but even if we accept that, and even without access to the 2024/25 financial report or projection, they must be in trouble. So much trouble that relegation could be a financial catastrophe, the likes of which the League has never seen.
We do know that in 2024/5 Tottenham won the Europa League and lost £120.6m. Not too bad except that it means that since 2020, they have lost £450m, which is rather careless.
In fact, digging into Tottenham’s reporting of itself, we find a fair bit of self-aggrandisement based on notions like “top six finishes” in relation to which they are behind all the other big clubs.
The point is, in fact, that the building of the new stadium was undertaken to make Tottenham look like a Big Six club, even if the results weren’t so good. The problem is that no one expected them to be this bad.
A new stadium always means a restriction on money for buying players. Arsenal, we might remember, were winning and winning until the move from Highbury to the new stadium. But Arsenal stayed in the top four and kept getting European money. Some fans repeated the “fourth is not a trophy” slogan, but Tottenham fans are more likely to be faced with either administration or relegation because they simply won’t have the income to pay for everything if they slip out of the top four. In short, they don’t have a Wenger.
Tottenham have also been living on unsubstantiated claims, such as the notion that as they were profitable a few years ago, they will be in their new stadium. Although possibly not if they are in the Championship. And the simple fact is that in 2024/25 a club that had been making money year after year started losing money just when they needed it to pay the interest on the money they borrowed to build the new stadium.
The losses come because it turns out that running the new Super Stadium costs almost three times as much as running the old WHL ground did. Worse, new players who come along and see the new ground expect big wages to go along with it. As a result the club with the sixth highest wages bill for a club that ends up 17th in the league.
If Tottenham do go down, they will still have to pay all those wages, but they simply won’t have the income from marketing etc..
But the biggest problem is that Tottenham have spent a lot of money on players who ain’t that good, just when they have to start paying for the stadium. In fact, they are the fourth highest spenders, but they haven’t bought players who will take them to the top of the league.
So they won the Europa but lost the regular profit on player sales that they made through the 2010s, and generally seem to sell players for less than they cost, while at the same time claiming that they always made a profit on player sales. But poor transfers mean they have players who are on high salaries but not delivering on the pitch, and are not sellable at the price they cost.
To meet their immediate bills, Tottenham seem to have started spending next season’s TV money. That simply sent the problem down the road to next season.
Now, when a company doesn’t have enough money to pay its staff, its interest and its debts, it either sells more or cuts costs or both. I’m told the last part of the stadium development around the ground has stopped.
In fact, Tottenham will probably be ok if they don’t go down, but if they do, then one of their main streams of income – TV – will collapse as would top value entertainment suits etc. If they went down, they would have the highest income in the Championship, but given the way they have performed under a range of managers this season, that doesn’t guarantee an immediate return. They would have to start selling players big time, but many players might not want to go, given their current high wages. A player could just sit it out, and then at the end of the contract walk away and pick up another high salary, as he would be moving on for free.
So salaries would come down a bit, but the interest on past deals would still be there. How many valiant Tottenham supporters would turn up for Tottenham v Lincoln, or Stockport?
So Tottenham will still have all its costs of interest payments no matter what, plus salaries, unless they can sell most of the first team, playing in a three-quarters-empty stadium and with no European games either. I think they might be in some difficulty.
Although of course they could turn it all around and shoot up the league!
