As Daniel Levy prepares for his 24th full season at the helm of Tottenham, fans will naturally start to wonder where this season will take them. Will the positive mood of last season hold? Will there finally be a trophy to vindicate the steady building of the whole Levy era? Off the pitch, will the club receive some much-needed external investment? Ultimately, will this be the year that anything changes, or will Spurs fans be having the same conversations again in the summer of 2025?It will be clear soon enough whether Spurs have the players they need for this season. On September 26, their eight-game Europa League group-stage campaign will begin. From that point on, the Spurs squad will be stretched further than they were in last year’s 41-game season.
Last season — at least until the very end — was a strikingly positive one at Spurs. If 2022-23 was marked by fans’ anger at Levy as the season unravelled, then 2023-24 was all about collective enthusiasm for the Postecoglou era and his style of play. A lot of the public anger about the direction of the club was neutralised by the appointment of a manager who was in tune with the club’s traditions and the expectations of the fans.
Whatever the ups and downs of the football season, there is another set of questions for Tottenham and Levy over the next 12 months. And that concerns the future shareholding of the club. (At present, ENIC owns 86.58 per cent of the club, and 70.12 per cent of ENIC’s share capital is owned by “a discretionary trust of which certain members of Mr (Joe) Lewis’s family are potential beneficiaries”, according to the club’s website. The rest is owned by discretionary trusts of which “Mr D Levy and certain members of his family are potential beneficiaries”.There is very little prospect of a full sale any time soon, and no real likelihood of the ENIC era coming to an end. What is on the cards, however, is the sale of a stake in the club. Tottenham have been frank about their openness to new investment.
If they could sell, for example, a 10 per cent stake in the club for £400m it would be a serious equity injection for Tottenham while not necessarily disrupting the operations of the club. The question is finding the right person to take the other side of that deal.
So far this summer, there has been plenty of speculation about Amanda Staveley potentially becoming a minority partner at Tottenham after her departure from Newcastle United. Ger search for new projects could involve buying a stake in another team. Tottenham have been linked. But whether Tottenham would want such a high-profile minority partner, given how quietly and discreetly they try to run things, is another matter.