Daniel Levy, a 38-year-old Cambridge economics graduate, is attempting to consolidate a fragmented industry and use the efficiencies to create a profitable business.
In December, Levy and famed currency speculator Joe Lewis, a U.K. tax exile who lives in the Bahamas, paid about $32 million for a portion of computer entrepreneur Sir Alan Sugar’s controlling stake in the U.K.'s Tottenham Hotspur football club. Levy and Lewis, operating through their quoted holding company ENIC, retain an option to absorb the rest later. That sounds like a high price to pay for a team that last year earned a measly £58,000 ($85,000) , and lost as many games as it won , but Levy contends that the investment is going to be a winner.
The Spurs, as they,re popularly known, will join ENIC’s pan-European stable, which already includes all or portions of the Czech Republic’s Slavia Prague, Greece’s AEK Athens, Italy’s Vicenza Calcio, Scotland,s champion Glasgow Rangers and Switzerland’s FC Basel. Levy says that owning teams in several European cities allows him to negotiate bigger and better deals. “Normally, if you have one team, you only have media and corporate sponsorship relationships within the team’s territory,” notes Levy, who bought and sold a number of textile and retail companies before taking control of ENIC (in which Lewis and his family are the largest shareholders) in 1995. He needs to prove fairly soon that his business model works: ENIC’s shares, after two years of operating losses, recently hit 110 pence, down from a high of 405p last spring.
