Antonio Conte, the new Tottenham manager, has promised Spurs fans they “deserve to have a competitive team with a will to fight” and said he would “do everything to [earn] their support”. While the fans welcome Conte’s desire to improve the club’s standing – they sit ninth in the Premier League and have not won a major honour since 2007-08 – many believe what the team really needs an injection of cash from their billionaire owner, Joe Lewis.
“We’re owned by this guy with a huge yacht who lives in the Bahamas, who appears more interested in making money out of us than investing in and supporting quality football,” says Jack Haw, a Spurs fan outside the glistening Tottenham Hotspur Stadium that sits on the site of the historic White Hart Lane ground, which was demolished on Lewis’s orders.
The 84-year-old Lewis – the 457th-richest person in the world with a £4.8bn fortune, according to the Bloomberg billionaires index – first bought a 27% stake in Spurs from Alan Sugar in 1991 for £22m.
Since then Lewis has increased his stake to 70.6% of Tottenham’s Bahamas-based parent company Enic, formerly English National Investment Company. The remaining 29.4% is owned by the family of the Tottenham chairman Daniel Levy, who tends to take the flack when things turn sour, as they did with Nuno Espírito Santo, who was sacked as manager after 17 games.
Enic, which is registered 4,000 miles away from N17 at a Nassau lawyers’ office that specialises in creating offshore tax structures and cropped up regularly in the Panama papers financial secrets leak, owns 85.6% of Tottenham Hotspur Limited. The remaining shares are owned by small private shareholders who refused to sell out, many of them understood to be longstanding Spurs fans.
The Tottenham Hotspur Supporters Trust is demanding a meeting with Lewis and Levy, saying the poor start to the season has “led many to question the focus of THFC’s board, what its objectives are and how it measures progress”.
“While individual decisions on players and tactics are not within the Trust’s remit, it is our job to question wider strategy when performance on the pitch falls short,” the trust says. “The club has decided it does not want to address the questions many fans are asking. It has declined to speak to the board of its official supporters’ trust.”
Lewis is rarely seen at the north London club, preferring to spend most of his time aboard his £98m superyacht Aviva. It is his third such yacht, each bigger and glitzier than the last, and all given the same name. Based mostly at his wife’s vast house in the ultra-exclusive Lyford Cay compound on New Providence island in the Bahamas (where there is no income tax, inheritance tax or wealth tax), Lewis travels the world aboard Aviva.
He sailed it up the Thames in 2018, docking for a week beside Tower Bridge, when a passerby noticed something familiar through the portholes: Francis Bacon’s “Triptych 1974 – 1977” hanging on a lower deck.
The paintings, which Lewis bought for £26m in 2008 and which are now worth multiples of that, had been until months earlier loaned to Tate Britain’s Bacon retrospective. They are just a small part of Lewis’s art collection, which includes pieces by Picasso, Matisse, Freud, Klimt, Degas and Moore. On his company website, Lewis’s collection is described as “one of the largest private art collections in the world”.
It is from the Aviva – which is also equipped with banks of computers for currency trading, a full-size indoor tennis court and a series of leather bound editions of the official history of Tottenham – that Lewis plotted the breakaway European Super League (ESL) with other billionaire club owners.
The JP Morgan-devised ESL plan collapsed less than 48 hours after it was announced in April following protests from fans at the six breakaway Premier League clubs. At Tottenham’s ground fans were seen with banners reading “I want my Tottenham back” and “ENIC Out – Sold a Soul You Didn’t Own”.
Harry Redknapp, a former Spurs manager, sought to reassure fans that Lewis would start spending on players after bringing in the former Chelsea manager Conte. “I can see them spending. I don’t think he [Conte] would have come if he hadn’t been able to improve the team,” Redknapp told TalkSPORT. “It was probably one of the arrangements for his coming.
“It’s not a poor club. Joe Lewis, people don’t realise how rich the Tottenham owner is, he’s up there with one of the richest men in the world. They can afford to bring in players and I think they sure will.”
However, Redknapp, who was Spurs manager between 2008 and 2012, has previously said Lewis was only interested in Tottenham as an investment. “Joe doesn’t go to watch Tottenham play and, not to appear disrespectful, he’s probably only half-interested in watching games,” Redknapp said in April when the ESL was announced. “It’s a chance to make more money for his investment and that’s what he’ll do.”
Lewis has been driven by money from an early age. Born above the Roman Arms pub in Bow, east London, he left school at 15 to help at his father’s catering company Tavistock Banqueting. Starting out as a waiter on £6 a week, Lewis hit upon a plan to attract more passing trade by carrying a concrete bus stop sign up the road to outside one of Tavistock’s cafes.
Soon he took over from his father and expanded into tourist restaurants with names such as Shakespeare’s Tavern, the Beefeater, and the Cockney, that offered lowbrow entertainment such as sword swallowers and knights in armour. They led the way to themed restaurant chains, and Lewis invested in his protege Robert Earl’s ventures Planet Hollywood and Hard Rock Café.
Lewis had brushes with the stars of the 1960s at a club he managed called The Talk of the Town, where Frank Sinatra, Diana Ross and Tom Jones all performed. He sold the family business in 1979 and relocated to the Bahamas, moving into the exclusive Lyford Cay, where neighbours included the late Sean Connery (who shot scenes for Thunderball on the beach there), and Count and Countess de Ravenel of France.
As well as improving on his golf swing and tennis backhand, Lewis set himself up as a currency trader. Famously, he is said to have made more than £1bn betting against the pound on Black Wednesday in 1992. He hit the jackpot again three years later betting against the Mexican peso.
Not all his financial bets have worked out so well, though. In 2008 he lost £1bn buying up shares in the US bank Bear Stearns as it teetered on the brink of collapse at the start of the financial crisis. Just days later it collapsed. His Tavistock Group holding company (named after his father’s catering business) now owns more than 200 businesses in 17 countries ranging from luxury hotels, and restaurants to biotechnology and financial services firms.
A keen golfer, Lewis also owns the luxury gated community of Isleworth Golf and Country club in Florida, where Tiger Woods has a $40m mansion. Lewis once paid £1.4m at a charity auction for the privilege of a round with Woods, and the pair became friends, with Woods once telling an interviewer he tended to run business ventures past Lewis.
Lewis does not do media. The only on-the-record interview with him in the last 25 years was given to the New York Times in 1998, in which he said: “One of the rewards of your success is the quiet enjoyment of it. Being on the front page of newspapers doesn’t allow that … The mystery to me is why there’s anything of particular interest about me.’’