Tottenham Hotspur’s season of glum headlines made a new addition to the canon on March 31, even as their supporters enjoyed the respite of an extended three-week break for international football and the FA Cup quarter-finals.
The release of Spurs’ financials for 2024-25, a season in which they won the Europa League no less, detailed a club-record £120.6million pre-tax loss. Last season generated the club’s sixth consecutive deficit. Their losses since the turn of the decade total £450m.
Tottenham’s income statement is subject to some quirks which don’t apply to other Premier League teams, as we’ll see. But even withstanding those, the club’s financial health has wilted, despite the building of a world-class stadium and record revenues.
Worse could be to come.
Even as Saturday’s trip to Wolves brought a first league victory of 2026, it merely allowed them to keep pace in a relegation battle neither they nor anyone else expected them to be so firmly mired in. With just four games remaining this season, Spurs are third-bottom of the Premier League, two points from safety and flirting with a fate for which the word ‘unprecedented’ cannot begin to suffice.
If that drop down to the Championship happens, it will be seismic, both within and beyond Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. That state-of-the-art venue hosting second-tier football would be a story in itself, vivid incongruence for a club who never expected to find themselves in this position.
Spurs have been one of the Premier League’s ‘Big Six’ for over a decade. A month from now, they may not be members of that league at all.
How have they arrived here? And what might relegation do to their pockets?
Spurs joined Brentford and Nottingham Forest last season in a club of paradoxes: each posted record revenues, but also turned them into record pre-tax losses. At all three, costs outstripped income even as the latter hit new highs, and it is a phenomenon far from limited to those teams. The same happened at several EFL clubs in 2024-25.
At Tottenham, those record revenues totalled £565.3million, a three per cent increase on the previous high set two years earlier. Improvements in both commercial and matchday income ensured dwindling Premier League prize money was offset, as did the financial benefits from winning the Europa League final.
One point which has distinguished England’s ‘Big Six’ from the rest is in how those clubs earn over half of their annual revenues from non-broadcast income (though Newcastle United notably entered that territory for the first time last season). Alongside the two Manchester clubs, Liverpool and Arsenal, Spurs’ matchday and commercial income topped £400million in 2024-25. The gulf to Chelsea’s figure — £287.6m — is stark, and reflects their fellow London club’s limitations while they remain at a Stamford Bridge which houses more than 20,000 fewer spectators than Tottenham’s ground does.
Earning a majority of income from non-TV money has been the case at Spurs since 2019, when Tottenham Hotspur Stadium opened, and their new home has been a strong earner. Matchday income has topped £100million in each of the past four seasons, and last season Spurs jumped past Liverpool to boast the third-highest gate receipts in England, even as the latter played in the more lucrative Champions League.
Tottenham’s stadium has become a coveted venue far beyond football, hosting NFL games annually alongside high-profile boxing events, rugby union matches and a bevy of music concerts.
The financial benefits of doing so are clear: Spurs earned £32.5million from non-football events last season. The average non-broadcast income of Premier League clubs outside the ‘Big Six’ was just £70.8m. That sum pushed their commercial income to £276.7m, an impressive £32m (13 per cent) increase in a year. Sponsorship income rose 11 per cent to £160m, and the club’s commercial revenue has now topped that of neighbours and arch-rivals Arsenal for eight years running.
Revenue should have hit another new high this season. The Athletic estimates Tottenham reaching the Champions League’s round of 16 earned them £74million in prize money, or roughly £40m more than they generated from winning the Europa League last year.
Spurs were football’s second most profitable club in 2018, yet despite revenues improving by £184.6million since then, the club’s pre-tax result has swung from a £138.9m profit to that £120.6m deficit. It is an alarming, quarter-billion-pound adverse swing.
It is also subject to some caveats.
The first stems from the very same factor helping to drive revenues to new heights. The stadium cost over £1billion to build and, as a result, Spurs’ depreciation charge has rocketed. Depreciation is an accounting concept which allocates the cost of an asset over its useful life (think transfer-fee amortisation, but for fixed assets). It is both a paper charge — Tottenham’s £57m depreciation expense in 2024-25 did not translate to cash paid out of the club — and also one reflective of reality, as assets do wear over time.
The cost of depreciating the stadium was always going to be large and, with no other English clubs having spent nearly so much on a new home (other than Everton, who didn’t move into theirs until this season), Spurs’ depreciation charge was always going to stand out.
Yet the club have also employed a rather aggressive depreciation policy. Spurs depreciate buildings over a period between five and 50 years but, based on the 2024-25 ‘Stadium’ charge, their new ground’s structure is being expensed over around 35. Several clubs hew more closely to 50 years; and Manchester United and Sunderland’s stadia are each depreciated over 75.
The shorter timeframe at Tottenham increases the annual charge, thus impacting their bottom line more than might otherwise be the case. When asked by The Athletic why they had opted to depreciate the stadium in such a way, the club did not provide a response.
Spurs’ depreciation charge is now £47million higher than in 2017-18, and last season saw a further £23.4m added to the deficit via the impact of a shift in the fair value of some warrant rights held by owner ENIC.
The warrants arose when ENIC injected cash as equity into the club in 2022, and essentially gifts it a larger shareholding, albeit only upon a change of controlling ownership. Those warrants equated to five per cent of Spurs shares when issued, stepping up by 1.5 per cent per annum between 2025 and 2032. In effect, the warrants increase ENIC’s holding in the club without new money having to be put in by the majority shareholder. The £23.4million charge in 2024-25 stemmed from an increase in the fair value of those warrants, driven by an uptick in Tottenham’s perceived market value.
Yet even after allowing for those non-cash matters, the underlying result has worsened noticeably.
Their EBITD (earnings before interest, tax and depreciation) was positive for 10 straight years, but that changed in 2024-25. With costs soaring, Spurs’ EBITD was £33.7million in the red, and a sharp departure from a record £126.5m positive result in 2018-19 — the season they reached the Champions League final.
In fairness, most Premier League clubs display poor operating profitability, and Spurs’ EBITD last season was still the fourth-best result in the division. But they also carry significant interest costs as a result of building the stadium, so they ideally need to be leaner at the operating level than others.
That they aren’t is exactly why ENIC has been moved to start putting money into the club, ostensibly to fund expenses which have far outstripped income growth. The £184.6million revenue improvement since 2018 has been dwarfed by cost rises; wages, operating costs and transfer-fee amortisation have risen by a collective £327.7m in the same period.
Tottenham remain one of the most careful salary payers in English football, and their wages to revenue figure of 45 per cent was the lowest across the top four divisions last season. For the second year running, they were not among England’s top six wage bills, though being seventh still meant their 17th-place finish in the top flight was a huge underachievement. The same will be true this season, even if relegation is avoided.
Other costs have ballooned. Operating expenses are up across football but their rise is particularly pronounced in north London, where both Spurs and Arsenal racked up over £200million in day-to-day costs last season.
As is the case with their neighbours, specifics have been kept to a minimum. Tottenham’s accounts attribute rising operating expenses to ‘hosting a larger number of football matches’ (31 — nine more than in 2023-24), alongside ‘third-party events and the technology transformation project’. Such costs rose at all but two Premier League clubs last season, but their £43.2million increase trailed only those of Arsenal (£52.6m) and Aston Villa (£56.8m). What’s more, Spurs’ operating costs are proportionally higher than anyone else’s, gobbling up 36 per cent of revenue.
Lack of transparency around operating costs is hardly unique to Tottenham, with a recent UEFA report labelling international financial reporting requirements ‘inadequate’ in understanding such costs, but the opacity does mean it is difficult to determine how much can be scythed in the event of relegation. The stadium is a world-class venue but costs a lot of money to run; the economics of operating it in the Championship are both unknown and unlikely to have been strongly considered in its planning stage.
Spurs will, at the very least, save money on travelling around Europe in UEFA competition next season.
The other big driver of costs, and losses, has been significant transfer spending. That reflects both a ballooning in player fees generally but also a sizeable shift in policy at Tottenham.
In six seasons to the end of 2018-19, Spurs spent £412.3million on new signings but offset it with some big sales, such as Gareth Bale and Kyle Walker. Their net spend in that period was just £68.4m, a figure 23 English clubs went beyond.
In the six full seasons since, £979.7million has gone on new Tottenham players and, despite the sizeable sale of Harry Kane to Bayern Munich in August 2023, only £258.3m has come back the other way. A further £159m net went on transfers last summer.
Since they began ramping up transfer spending in 2019-20, Spurs are England’s fourth-highest net spenders, even remaining ahead of Liverpool after last summer’s record splurge by the champions. In seven seasons, they have spent £880.3million net on players, over £200m more than both Liverpool (£649.7m) and Manchester City (£625.2m). The trio of Chelsea, Manchester United and Arsenal have all spent over £1bn in that time.
The impact on Tottenham’s bottom line has been clear. In 2018-19, a £47.5million transfer-fee amortisation bill was in the Premier League’s bottom half. By last season, that cost had increased to £141.2m, fifth-highest in England and 25 per cent of revenue (2018-19 — 10 per cent).
The strategy hasn’t been particularly successful.
Winning the Europa League shouldn’t be sniffed at, but it was also an outlier rather than the norm. Spurs’ on-pitch performance has dropped off right at the time they’ve plunged deep into the transfer market, which reflects rather badly on their recruitment.
The club made player sales profits of £276.2million between 2013 and 2019, only topped by Chelsea (£398.8m) and Liverpool (£303.0m). In the next six-year period, even as transfer fees have soared and Kane, an academy graduate with minimal book value, was sold, Spurs made £203.9m — less than nine other English teams.
Even in the year of Kane’s departure, Tottenham sold players for less than they had cost them to buy. That has been the case for the past seven years running, reflecting the club’s inability to improve guys’ values while they are in north London.
That’s not out of the norm for the ‘Big Six’, who generally pay big fees for first-team signings which are unlikely to be recouped in full, but since 2019, Spurs have moved players on for £356.7million less than they were originally acquired for. That would be of less consequence if they’d gotten plenty out of them — Hugo Lloris, for example, left on a free in December 2023 after 11 years at the club — but for the most part, Tottenham have just got worse in that time.
Wages are a better corollary for performance, and, after several years of overachieving in the 2010s, Spurs generally began to land around where their salary costs would peg them. But, as of last season, that maxim has been shattered, too.
The Athletic detailed the cash crunch headed Spurs’ way a year ago, and events since have only confirmed them as a club who have departed from the self-sustaining strategy previously emblematic of ENIC’s ownership. For much of its first two decades at the helm, owner funding was neither required nor given. Even a £40million loan from ENIC in 2013-14 was repaid over the following three seasons.
Naturally, the stadium build needed significant lending, and Spurs’ £875.2million debt (£851.7m in borrowings, £23.5m in lease liabilities) at the end of June 2025 was the third highest in world football, only trailing Barcelona and Real Madrid.
Yet that lending was secured at low interest, with most of the debt at fixed rates and not due for repayment until well in the future. The average maturity date lands in the 2040s. Around £30million in annual interest payments flow out of the club, more than at any English side bar Manchester United but, relative to the size of their borrowings, that’s impressively low given current worldwide rates.
Even so, those interest costs bite rather harder when operating performance has tumbled in the manner it has for Tottenham. A once self-sustaining club have increasingly had to turn to others for cash.
As documented by The Athletic when Spurs’ 2024-25 accounts landed, they had just £20.4million in liquid cash on hand at the end of June, a 10-year low and a nearly £180m reduction in just two years. Even as the stadium build and its attendant costs completed, Spurs’ free cash flow — cash generated after covering operating costs and capital spending, like that on transfers — has remained mired in the red.
Last season generated a funding gap of £91.7million, similar to the year before. It was plugged using £58.6million of their existing cash balance, a £35m equity injection from ENIC and a £1.9m increase in borrowings.
While those soaring operating costs have bitten chunks out of operating cash flows that once topped £200million, it is transfer spending which has pushed Tottenham into needing external funding. In 2024-25, net cash out the door on players exceeded £100m for a third year running.
That is likely to have continued in 2025-26.
Even before spending that £159million last summer, Spurs owed a net £242.8m on transfers at the end of last June, almost half of it due inside a year. They now routinely hold some of the highest transfer debt in football, albeit both Manchester clubs topped £300m at the end of last season.
Champions League revenues this season have doubtless helped cash flow, but we already know Tottenham have turned elsewhere for funding again. ENIC injected a further £100million in shares in October, on the back of £35m in December 2024. Ownership has provided £232.5m in four years, against a net £24.6m during the previous 20.
A month before that, they ‘factored’ some of this season’s Premier League prize money distributions with Macquarie, an Australian lender. Such arrangements with Macquarie aren’t uncommon in football, but they are for Spurs. In exchange for a slice of their TV income this season, the club received a slab of money up front, which will then be repaid to Macquarie as the Premier League doles out its distributions.
The sum factored is undisclosed in the accounts. Bloomberg reported an amount of £90million but, when The Athletic requested confirmation from Tottenham, they did not respond. Whatever the number, it points to a club in continued need of external funding, which is a sharp departure from much of ENIC’s reign.
Some belt-tightening is already apparent beyond the field.
Spurs received approval to build a 30-storey hotel next to the stadium two years ago, and up to the end of June 2025 had committed £17.5million to that scheme. However, the build has barely begun; in a meeting with their Fan Advisory Board (FAB) in December, the club confirmed the ‘hotel development project remains on pause’.
There have long been plans to develop the area around the ground, including four residential towers behind the South Stand, but the same FAB minutes detail those moves as under review. The exception is the Printworks, a 287-bed student accommodation scheme on Tottenham High Road which began works last July.
Matthew Collecott, Spurs’ director of finance and operations, is the sole director of the UK-registered entity set up to manage the Printworks, though that business, like several others in their property portfolio, sits beyond the club’s corporate structure.
The Printworks company is ultimately overseen by High Road Holdings Limited, a company registered, like ENIC, in the Bahamas. Other UK-registered property businesses controlled by Bahamas-based companies include High Road West (Tottenham) Limited, Fairgate Tottenham Limited and Goodsyard Tottenham Limited. Across those three entities, all linked to Spurs’ owners but not headed or funded by the club, and now seemingly under review, development property stock totalled £50.7million at the end of June last year.
What would relegation next month do to Spurs’ finances? The obvious answer is ‘Nothing good’, though the extent of the bad is difficult to discern. There are no comparables to draw upon.
Revenue will take a battering. Even if they finish 18th in the 20-team table, Tottenham can expect TV money in the region of £200million this season, inclusive of that £74m from the Champions League. As a Championship side, estimated broadcast income would tumble to just £55m.
The impact on other revenue streams is much harder to determine. Matchday income would take a hit from hosting less lucrative games and, potentially, selling fewer tickets. Premium memberships will also be rather less appealing if they are in England’s second tier.
What exactly will happen to commercial revenues is unclear, although people close to the club say Spurs are relatively well protected. Their kit and merchandising contract with Nike generated £86million in 2024-25, the seventh highest amount in European football. It is unknown what impact relegation would have on that deal, or indeed any other.
Even if some reduction did take place, they would go into the Championship with by far the highest commercial income of any relegated club.
Leeds United, in 2022-23, boast the current record at £48million — nearly six times less than Tottenham’s commercial income last season.
Despite the big drop, Spurs still would boast by far the Championship’s highest income. That £32.5million from non-football events at the stadium last season was higher than the total matchday income of any club in the second tier, and is a revenue stream agnostic of footballing performance.
Parachute-payment clubs already enjoy a revenue advantage over the rest, and Tottenham would be way out in front even without the £50million they’d receive via that route next season. A reasonable estimate of the club’s revenue in the Championship lands at or beyond £300m; the division’s current record is just £137m, and most of its teams reside in the £25m to £40m range.
Of course, Spurs would also be way out in front on costs. As explained earlier, we don’t know the make-up of their £202million operating costs, but they wouldn’t be easily slashed. Record revenues did not translate to profits, and having an income advantage over the rest of the Championship would be of limited value given the expenses involved in running the world-class infrastructure Tottenham boast.
The Athletic reported in March that a majority of the current squad will see their wages halved if relegation occurs, and it is a safe bet plenty of them will be off anyway if the club do land in the Championship. Fees earned from those sales would help offset tumbling revenues, though Spurs’ transfer debts won’t just disappear on relegation and will need to be serviced.
One of the many embarrassments of potential relegation for Spurs is they would record the highest wage bill ever for a side to go down.
The 2025-26 figure there is unknown but their existing wages of £255.8million sit far beyond the average of most relegated teams and indeed the previous record for one to suffer that fate: Leicester City went down in 2022-23 with a wage bill of over £200m but, after adjusting for their 13-month accounting period, the figure was around £190m. Even that was far beyond the second-highest bill: Leicester, again, last season at £152.9m.
Most relegated teams turn to player sales to boost their coffers, and an exodus of first-teamers looks pretty obvious if the worst happens for Tottenham in the next few weeks. Whether they’ve shown it this season or not, plenty in the current squad would be fancied elsewhere, above the level of England’s second tier. How much the club can feasibly recoup is another matter entirely though, and past evidence suggests they’ll struggle to make their money back.
Other costs will remain unmoved; £30million in annual interest payments looks good against £500m to £600m revenues, much less so when income droops to the level it would in the Championship. The benefits of a world-class stadium are reduced if the competition it hosts is of lesser prestige. It is impossible to tell, but it would be interesting to know how much, if anything, the place’s football operations add to Spurs’ bottom line if both Premier League and Champions League matches are absent.
ENIC’s funding of its football club has ramped up in recent seasons, as the cost of investing in the squad has not been rewarded on the field. Even this season, with a return to Champions League football, Spurs were moved to drawing on a reported £190million across funding from ownership and that Macquarie agreement.
If relegation comes, and perhaps even it doesn’t, ENIC will likely have to delve into its pockets once more.
Any pain incurred by having to provide more funding will be compounded by the inevitable impact of relegation on Spurs’ value.
The official line is, and long has been, that they are not for sale. Yet it is also obvious that at just about every large English club, the owners are keen to see their asset appreciate.
A year outside the Premier League would do little to push Tottenham toward the £3.75billion valuation previously desired. More than one season in exile would paint an even grimmer picture.
That valuation, of course, was pushed for by then chairman Daniel Levy, whose departure sent shockwaves through football last September. Levy had widely been admired as one of the sport’s canniest operators, and viewed as instrumental in helping Spurs build a world-class stadium and remain sustainable while competing at the top end of the Premier League. Levy was paid £5.8million during his final full season in 2024-25, which is more than any other director at an English club.
Levy retains a 29.88 per cent holding in ENIC, but is gone from the top table at Tottenham. Whether the club will echo his fall from grace will become clear soon enough, and many are watching closely. A Spurs in the Championship could have an impact far beyond their area of north London.
The consensus has generally been that England’s elite clubs are relegation-proof; Manchester United’s painful mismanagement in the post-Sir Alex Ferguson years has been evidence enough of that. Spurs dropping through the trapdoor to the Championship would render that an illusion.
In turn, valuations of the Premier League’s top teams might be viewed with greater scepticism. The ‘Big Six’ are each dependent on the riches of the Champions League to make their business models work. Falling out of the top tier entirely hardly bears thinking about for would-be investors.
A reason English football clubs already lag behind franchise valuations in North America (where there is no relegation) is revenue uncertainty, even as most assume Premier League status is a given. Removing that assumed floor would hinder valuations further, and, as The Athletic outlined last week, some current ownership groups are particularly in need of a valuation boost in the near future.
That has long been a talked-of aim at Spurs too, but the once-simple task of staying in the top flight now takes on primary importance. Going down should not put them out of business, but it wouldn’t be very welcome either.
Tottenham have gone from England’s most profitable and self-sustaining club to one where costs are racing past revenues and transfer debts have piled up. Winning the Europa League aside — an achievement, without doubt — they have little to show for it. Relegation would be the ultimate indignity.
It might also show the rest of football’s elite that, even in today’s game, not quite everything can be dictated by money. It might remind plenty that football is, always has been, and always should be, a sport at root.
Bad teams, if they’re just bad enough, are vulnerable to the consequences of being bad, no matter how rich they are.
