Tottenham hold out for world record £25m-a-year deal to sell stadium naming rights but no buyer imminent
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.
The Spurs chairman confirmed he is not close to agreeing a naming-rights deal for the stadium that Tottenham moved into in April following a series of delays - one of which has been revealed to have been a revenge attack after one of the club’s warehouses was turned into a cannabis factory.
Telegraph Sport has been told that Levy wants a naming-rights deal worth £25m-a-year for a 15-year commitment, which would earn Tottenham £375m.
Such a figure would eclipse Manchester City’s with Etihad, currently the biggest in English football, which is valued at £21.9m-a-year.
It would also be worth more per year than the highest naming-rights deal in world sport, which is the Scotiabank Arena that plays host to Toronto NHL, NBA and National Lacrosse League teams.
The £488m Scotiabank deal is spread over 20 years, which makes it worth £24.4m a year. The MetLife Stadium, which is home to the New York Giants and New York Jets NFL teams, earns about £13m-a-year from its naming rights deal with MetLife.
Levy’s record-breaking valuation has so far failed to attract a buyer for the package, but the 57-year-old remains insistent his price must be met.
In an interview with London's 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 £17.5m-a-year and a source said: “If you look at global equivalents, Daniel Levy is quoting too high.”
While Tottenham’s stadium has been praised as one of the best in the world, transport links to the site remain poor, despite a £100m investment, and plans to develop High Road West have stalled.
Other than Levy’s price tag, the travel and regeneration issues may well 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. Clearly, we know London has a shortage of housing. We are not against housing per se, but we need to create a place for people to live, study, work and play.
The building of Tottenham’s new stadium has been detailed in a new book Destination Tottenham and includes the story of how a warehouse that had been bought by the club as one of around 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,” said Levy. “We obviously 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 down the High Road were cut, which flooded them all.”
