Premier League club in talks with Gulf investors

A dozen companies in the Gulf are in talks with English Premier League football club Tottenham Hotspur over potential investment in its new 58,000-seater stadium in London.

Officials from the Premier League side are in the region in a bid to sell the naming rights for the stadium and look for possible sponsors of its team shirt.

The club was in talks with three or four companies in Dubai, in addition to firms in Abu Dhabi, Bahrain and Qatar, according to Paul Barber, executive director of Tottenham.

Tottenham is looking to cash in on the tremendous popularity of the Premier League in the Gulf.

“There’s a lot of excitement here about what we’re doing as this will probably be the only football stadium to be built in London in the next decade,” he told Arabian Business in an interview on Wednesday.

He said financing the stadium was “challenging” for the club in the current financial climate.

“The critical part of that financing is finding a sponsor and we have identified the Middle East and the Far East as most likely to deliver that partner,” he said.

But he denied the trip was made with the intention of finding potential buyers of the club.

In addition to the stadium, the development will also include 450 new homes, offices, a 150-bedroom hotel and one of the largest supermarkets in the UK.

The club’s shirt sponsorship agreement with internet casino operator Mansion, worth around $12.3m annually, expires next year.

Barber said it was possible the shirt and stadium sponsor would be the same company, as was the case with the club’s North London rivals Arsenal, which struck a similar deal with the UAE’s Emirates airline in 2004, reportedly worth $174m over ten years.

He said any deal could last as long as 15 years.

Barber said it was difficult to put a figure on how much the deal for the naming rights of the stadium was worth as any agreement with a partner could involve a “gift in kind”, such as construction of the stadium in return for sponsorship. The cost of the stadium is believed to be around $434m.

There were sponsorship opportunities from companies across different sectors in the Middle East and the Far East with emerging brands which were looking for exposure as they built their businesses internationally, Barber said.

Broadcast in 211 territories, the Premier League has a global audience of 4.77 billion every season. Over the last three seasons, Tottenham has been among the top five clubs in the competition in terms of global television coverage of matches, according to Barber.

Around 162.6 million people supported the club worldwide, he said.

“For a global brand, that’s a hugely attractive proposition to be able to reach that many people in that many places from one football club,” he said.

Barber said he would return to the region in a couple of weeks to visit Kuwait and Oman and would be back in the region twice more in the next quarter to build relationships with investors.

The club would also visit the Asia-Pacific region in the summer for the same purpose, he said.

Barber has also been in talks with government officials and the UAE Premier League, with a view to establishing football links with local clubs if commercial partnerships with businesses in the region go ahead.

He said this could lead to Tottenham providing coaching for local clubs or staging exhibition matches.

He said the club would announce a partnership with one of the two big food retailers in the UK for the supermarket in the next few weeks and was in talks with four or five hotel companies over the takeover of the hotel.

The club has applied for planning permission for the stadium, which would take 36 months to build once construction starts.