Football

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Spurs await Enic's vision of glory game

By David Conn

Thursday, 21 December 2000

Sir Alan Sugar is, we are told, expected "as soon as practicable" to sell 27 per cent of Tottenham Hotspur for £22m to Enic - the English National Investment Company - a strange bit-player in football's commercialisation which has large stakes in five European clubs. Sugar, who bought 48 per cent of Spurs for £8m in 1991 in partnership with Terry Venables, who took 22 per cent, says he has grown to love the club, and wanted to pass it to a suitable "custodian". He is expected to make £14m personally on the deal, while keeping 13 per cent of Tottenham.

Sir Alan Sugar is, we are told, expected "as soon as practicable" to sell 27 per cent of Tottenham Hotspur for £22m to Enic - the English National Investment Company - a strange bit-player in football's commercialisation which has large stakes in five European clubs. Sugar, who bought 48 per cent of Spurs for £8m in 1991 in partnership with Terry Venables, who took 22 per cent, says he has grown to love the club, and wanted to pass it to a suitable "custodian". He is expected to make £14m personally on the deal, while keeping 13 per cent of Tottenham.

For Spurs fans, the "glory glory" club is being traded again. Sugar, who originally rescued Tottenham from serious debt - and the jaws of Robert Maxwell - says his family persuaded him to quit following a fans' campaign, including a mass stand-up protest at last month's Worthington Cup defeat by Birmingham.

Joff Wild, of the "Save Our Spurs" campaign, said his group was not responsible for the excesses, such as posting Sugar's personal mobile phone number on the Internet, but said most fans were determined to see him go.

"We're grateful for what he did at the beginning, but he had no understanding of what Spurs means to its supporters. Clubs have brands - Newcastle's is 50,000 Geordies in black and white shirts sticking with the club through thick and thin. Spurs is about romance."

The 38-year-old Wild says he is not recalling "sepia-tinted" days, but merely his own youth, when White Hart Lane's Shelf purred at Glenn Hoddle, Osvaldo Ardiles and Ricardo Villa. But he accepts that all Spurs fans, including those, like him, not born in 1961, cherish the memory of the Double-winning team, and captain Danny Blanchflower's comment - a motto-cum-burden ever since: "The great fallacy is that the game is first and last about winning. It's nothing of the kind. The game is about glory. It's about doing things in style, with a flourish."

Sugar, Wild claims, has failed to understand this, while practising sensible financial husbandry at Tottenham Hotspur plc. Wild is puzzled by Enic's reluctance to bid for over 30 per cent, but nevertheless welcomes its arrival, partly because the Enic managing director, Daniel Levy, is apparently a Tottenham fan.

"We think they will understand what Tottenham symbolises, and spend enough to restore it," Levy said.

Yet Enic, described this week somewhat debatably as a "giant international sports and leisure group", is, in football terms, a part-owner of Rangers and four other clubs in far-off lands of which we know comparatively little. Formerly an investment vehicle for the Bahamas-based leisure and currency-dealing magnate Joe Lewis, Enic has been managed since 1995 by Levy, 38, whose family set up the Mister Byrite low-price clothing chain. Lewis has passed his 20 per cent of Enic to his son, Charles, who owns the shares offshore, via Pan-Caribbean Investment Inc.

Levy began to acquire football club stakes around 1997, in the flush of the City's short-lived love affair with football. While some English chairmen were making fortunes via stock-market floatations of their clubs, Levy looked to Europe for cheap investments. There was one chief target: television revenue. Enic bought into Vicenza in Italy, Slavia Prague in the Czech Republic, AEK Athens in Greece, and Basle in Switzerland. The company also owns 20 per cent of Rangers, an investment which is described as "sleeping".

Levy's idea was to buy a group of clubs which could negotiate central sponsorship, even TV deals, and also, controversially, inter-deal in players. But Enic met two major sets of difficulties.

In May 1998, both Slavia Prague and AEK Athens qualified for the Uefa Cup. European football's governing body ruled that two clubs in "common ownership" could not play in the same competition, because it would "compromise the game's integrity". Enic spent £1.3m taking Uefa to the International Court of Arbitration for Sport. It allowed AEK and Slavia to compete pending its decision, but ultimately upheld Uefa's ruling. Levy described the decision as "a retrograde step for football in Europe", but since then Enic has not taken majority stakes in any further clubs.

"We are," Levy said, however, "resolved to continue maximising the value of the investments."

This clinical approach to football in the 1990s had, though, to deal with the game's complexities; of supporters, management and individual cultures around Europe. Enic's record, mostly of cautious profit and no great footballing success, could have Spurs fans hauling themselves up in protest if replicated for too long in N17.

Vicenza, relegated in 1999, bounced back to Serie A last season, where they hover around the bottom third. Enic has introduced commercial activities, but plans to develop the Romero Menti stadium are still stalled in talks with the local authority. Enic admits Vicenza is a selling club, providing "highly profitable player trading," including the £6m sale of the striker Gianni Comandini to Milan.

Basle, one of Switzerland's top clubs, finished third in the league last year but this season finished only fifth in the Swiss League's pre-winter qualification tournament. Their coach is a certain Christian Gross. Basle's stadium is, though, being refurbished, at, Enic says proudly, "no cost to Enic or the club".

Local difficulties at AEK Athens have been such that Enic has reduced its stake to 47 per cent, selling the rest to NetMed, a Dutch-owned pay-TV company.

Slavia Prague finished second in the Czech league last season, qualifying for the Champions' League preliminary round, but were knocked out and are currently in eighth place. Perpetually overshadowed by rivals Sparta, Slavia faced protests of their own at last month's 0-0 draw with Drnovice, the crowd of 2,700 chanting "Leska Out" to the managing director, Vladimir Leska.

"Daniel is clever," an Enic insider commented, "but it has been difficult. They have had to change their strategy."

Enic has moved into other emerging industries, profiting greatly from Autonomy, an Internet software company. Last year it moved into online gambling, buying ukbetting.com and 25 per cent of Victor Chandler online, part of a tax-free, Gibraltar-based gambling empire. Charles Lewis, Joe's son, is responsible for the group's leisure interests, including a struggling chain of Warner Brothers stores, a theme restaurant in Orlando, and a new cabaret restaurant in Las Vegas.

This odd portfolio, and the football clubs' varying fortunes, suggest Enic, which has a small management team of around a dozen in London, spots market opportunities shrewdly, but has yet to achieve spectacular success in running football clubs. Last year it made an operating loss of £8.2m; following a £13m operating loss the previous year.

Enic's advocates say it has learned from experience and is perfect for Spurs, promising a gradual five-year plan to build the club commercially, rather than spend big now. George Graham is said to be regarded as an asset, not a candidate for replacement.

Enic represents a new phase for the glory club's more recent role as guinea pigs for commercial exploitation. In 1983, chairman Irving Scholar made Spurs the first club to float on the Stock Exchange. It failed, but set the structure for others, forming holding companies to bypass long-standing Football Association rules seeking to restrict shareholders profiting out of clubs. In 1991, Sugar took over, with the First Division clubs about to break away to form the Premier League. At the time, Sugar's company, Amstrad, was making satellite dishes for the then floundering BSkyB. Sugar's was the crucial vote at the meeting which sent the subsequent television deal Sky's way and transformed its fortunes.

Now, he will leave £14m richer, from a new age when "custodians" has a different meaning. Spurs fans must wait to see whether, among Enic's pan-European business visions, there is still room for innocent pleasures, such as seeing football played with style, with a flourish.

davidconn@freeuk.com

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