By David Owen
April 21 – Just at the moment, everything Tottenham Hotspur touches is turning to gold. The North London club – the only team still realistically capable of derailing Leicester City’s Premier League fairy tale – is enjoying a dream season, with a Champions League slot for 2016-17 all but secured.
Off the field, meanwhile, the club – which topped the Premier League profits table in 2013-14 thanks to the highly lucrative sale of Gareth Bale to Real Madrid – has netted a tidy windfall from an unusual source: the sale of a nearby primary school.
Tucked away in Spurs’s recently published financial accounts for the year to 30 June 2015 are the following two sentences: “On 24 July 2015, the group disposed of Brook House Primary School for sale proceeds of £11,000,000. The net book value of the asset at 30 June 2015 was £2,600,000.”
All things being equal, therefore, it looks like the club will book an £8.4 million profit on the transaction in the current year – a tidy sum when you consider that its overall pre-tax profit in 2014-15 weighed in at £12.1 million on turnover of £196.4 million.
Of course, the club has not diversified into educating 7-11 year-olds. The school is located just north of its White Hart Lane base. Insideworldfootball understands that the site was part of a substantial property holding Spurs built up in the area before its new stadium build was precisely delineated. With the so-called Northumberland Development Project now expected to be finished in 2019, recent times are said to have brought a number of transactions involving property that either will or won’t be needed.
With 2014-15 bringing no player sales of Bale-like proportions, one of the keys to Spurs’s latest profit was wage restraint. Aggregate payroll costs were almost flat at £100.8 million, versus £100.4 million in 2013-14.
With TV money little changed and match receipts actually edging down to £41.2 million, a jump in sponsorship and corporate hospitality revenue from £37.3 million to £48.9 million was also important. The club attributed this to it being the first year of a new five-year shirt sponsorship deal with AIA.
Pay restraint did not entirely stretch to the boardroom, with the total aggregate remuneration of the directors of Tottenham Hotspur Limited climbing almost 20% to £4.31 million, and the highest-paid director getting £2.61 million, up from £2.17 million – also a rise of 20%.
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