Levy wants £375m for naming rights to Spurs’ stadium
Daniel Levy has set a world-record £25 million-a-year naming rights price on Tottenham Hotspur’s £1billion stadium, for which he has so far failed to find a buyer.
Levy, the Spurs chairman, confirmed he is not close to agreeing a naming-rights deal for the stadium the club moved into in April following a series of delays – one of which has been revealed to have been down to a revenge attack, after it emerged that one of the club’s warehouses was a cannabis factory.
The Daily Telegraph has been told that Levy wants a namingrights deal worth £25million a year for 15 years, which would earn Tottenham £375 million. That would eclipse Manchester City’s deal with Etihad, currently the biggest in English football, which is valued at £21.9million a year.
It would also be worth more per year than the biggest deal in world sport, which is the Scotiabank Arena that plays host to Toronto NHL, NBA and lacrosse teams.
The £488million Scotiabank deal is spread over 20 years, which makes it worth £24.4million a year. The Metlife Stadium, home to the New York Giants and New York Jets NFL teams, earns about £13million a year from its naming-rights deal.
Levy’s record-breaking valuation has so far failed to attract a buyer for his Tottenham package, but the 57-year-old remains insistent his price must be met.
In an interview with the Evening Standard, Levy said: “We are only going to do a naming-rights deal if we get the right brand, in the right sector, on the right money.
“If we can’t meet those three criteria, we won’t do it. At the moment, we haven’t found a company that meets all three criteria. We are not really close to anything on that at the moment.”
Experts believe a more realistic market value of Tottenham’s naming rights is £17.5 million a year, A source said: “If you look at global equivalents, Daniel Levy is quoting too high.”
While Tottenham’s stadium has been hailed as one of the best in the world, transport links to the site remain poor, despite a £100million investment, and plans to develop the High Road West have stalled.
Other than Levy’s price tag, the travel and regeneration issues may be causing companies interested in buying the naming rights to have second thoughts.
Levy has urged Haringey Council to match his ambition for the area by saying: “They need to think big, like entrepreneurs, out of the box. We’ve created a destination that has global focus and we need to make sure everything around us benefits from that, including the local community. We are trying to create a centre where we change part of north London, where there is activity in the day and the evenings.
“From a heritage point of view, we wanted to stay in Tottenham. But we wanted to see investment and uplift around the stadium happen and there are no signs of it.”
The building of Tottenham’s new stadium has been detailed in a new book Destination Tottenham, which includes a story of how a warehouse that had been bought by the club as one of about 80 different property transactions was broken into and turned into a cannabis farm.
“We discovered it had been bolted shut from the inside and when we finally got in we found three acres of cannabis growing in there,” Levy said. “We had to call the police. The next thing we knew we were victims of a revenge attack when the water pipes on the properties we owned were cut, which flooded them all.”