There was a time, not that long ago really, when Tottenham Hotspur were synonymous with frugality. The knock on the club, and foremost on their erstwhile chairman Daniel Levy, was that they had money but wouldn’t spend it. Cash-rich. ‘Ambition’-poor.
That is a tougher argument to square now.
The signing last week of Mateus Fernandes and the arrival on Monday of Sandro Tonali rubber-stamp the new reality in the blue-and-white half of north London: Tottenham are spending big. For some time, the only player they’d ever committed a guaranteed fee in excess of £50million for was Tanguy Ndombele, who joined from Lyon in 2019. But with these latest recruits, they will have spent over £50m on five separate transfers in a year.
Fernandes’ £85million purchase from West Ham United smashed the club’s transfer record when it was announced on Thursday. Tonali, an initial £92.5m recruit on his way from Newcastle United, has gazumped his new team-mate in short order. If £7.5m in add-on clauses crystallise, the latter deal will make Spurs only the fifth English club to spend £100m on a player.
Even by the standards of modern English football, Tottenham’s outlay is eyebrow-raising. Inside the first three weeks of the summer window, they have committed a reported £230million on three signings. Add unreported agent fees and the Premier League’s transfer levy of four per cent on every incoming transfer, and their splurge tops a quarter of a billion pounds. The club’s single-season record is £272.2m (in 2023-24).
Or it was.
Following the signing of defender Jan Paul van Hecke from Brighton and Hove Albion for £52million before the end of the 2025-26 accounting year, The Athletic projects Spurs’ spending on new players landed just shy of £300m last season. On a net basis, we reckon around £240m was spent, comfortably higher than the club’s previous record of £180.1m (again set in 2023-24). Mere days into July, a further £200m or so has been committed to bringing in Fernandes and Tonali.
Big spending is hardly new in the Premier League, but seeing it unfold at Tottenham rather jars with the club’s recent on-pitch malaise. For a time, there was genuine concern, even expectation in some quarters, that they could be in the 2026-27 Championship. Relegation was no distant possibility; at one stage it was knocking at the door, holding a scythe.
Such a calamity was avoided. But financially, there was still reason for concern.
An uptick in overall Premier League prize money meant Spurs earned around £8million more from domestic distributions in 2025-26 than a season earlier, despite finishing 17th each time, but several of their peers saw far greater growth.
They’ll hope to improve considerably on those takings in 2026-27, but missing out on European football for the coming season will sharply reduce takings elsewhere.
Tottenham earned an estimated £74.3million in distributions from last season’s Champions League, where they made the round of 16, and more on top from takings at the turnstiles. In 2022-23, their previous Champions League campaign, they earned £8.8m in gate receipts from four European home games. Three years on, with higher ticket prices and an extra fixture at their place, this figure will have been even higher.
Those declining revenues pair with a previously shaky-looking cash position.
Spurs had just £20.4million cash on hand at the end of June 2025, a near £180m reduction in two years. Servicing big transfer spending accounted for much of that, with more to come: at the same date, they owed other clubs £242.8m in net transfer payments, one of the largest such figures in football. That was before they spent a net £159m more in the market last summer, and then went again in the winter window and over recent weeks.
Champions League money will have helped pay the bills last season, but the greater factor has been a shift in strategy at the top of the club. After two decades of parsimony, ENIC, the firm that holds a majority ownership stake in Spurs, is now pumping funds in.
Spurs took on almost £900million in external debt to build their world-class stadium in the second half of the 2010s, but since then, external funding has arrived from shareholders. That began in 2022 but has ratcheted up more recently. Following a £100m share issue last month, ENIC, and principally the Lewis family, who own the company, have provided £235m cash in 18 months.
That was the second £100million injection inside a year, and Tottenham also brought forward a big chunk of Premier League monies last September, ostensibly to meet cash flow needs. That amount is expected to have been repaid in-year, so won’t have added to the year-end debt pile, but there’s been clear choreography to ensure sufficient cash is in place — something which, for a very long time under ENIC, was not really a worry.
Large-scale owner funding has helped enable what we’ve seen so far this summer, and it’s uncertain whether ENIC’s commitment will end there. Public sight of that transfer bill is a year out of date, but it is unlikely to have been reduced. It may be that more funding from the Lewises is needed. The family’s ability to do so at least looks assured; 12 days following the June £100m injection, an auction of items from patriarch Joe Lewis’ art collection at Sotheby’s raised £296.3million, according to The New York Times, a London record for the sale of artworks from a single owner.
Fans of other clubs might also wonder how Spurs can afford this activity while remaining within football’s financial rules. Yet a relative lack of liquidity (at least prior to ENIC’s funding) bears little relevance to compliance, with football’s regulations previously focused on keeping losses low and, now, trained on how much clubs spend on their squads.
The losses at Tottenham have rocketed in recent seasons, though much of that owes to a huge depreciation charge on the stadium — an expense which is deducted from loss-based calculations. They have dipped into underlying deficits too, but those are not so large that they’ll have trouble with the Premier League’s profitability and sustainability rules (PSR), which, in any case, will cease to operate once clubs are assessed on the recently ended 2025-26 season.
UEFA, European football’s governing body, still employs a loss-based ‘football earnings’ rule, and Spurs will be cognisant of that should they return to continental competition down the road. But, again, recent football earnings figures at the club have been well shy of the limit UEFA sets.
More pertinent just now is the squad cost rule (SCR) that will be in operation both domestically and abroad from 2026-27 onwards. The likelihood is Tottenham will aim to stay under UEFA’s stricter 70 per cent limit — whereby clubs can only spend 70 per cent of turnover plus averaged player profits on player and coaching wages, amortised transfer fees and agent fees — but even at that lower level, they have scope for manoeuvre.
Much to their supporters’ chagrin, Spurs have routinely operated one of the lowest wages-to-revenue figures in both English and European football.
In 2024-25, a season where they were without Champions League football, just 45 per cent of revenue went on total wages. The amount spent on players, relevant for SCR purposes, is even lower. Clubs don’t release player wage details but, per a UEFA report in 2022-23, Tottenham’s player wages were just 32 per cent of turnover.
Even with growing amortisation costs on transfer fees, total wages and amortisation as a proportion of revenue in 2024-25 was just 70 per cent. That also doesn’t include the averaged player profits that are added into the SCR calculation. In other words, they have plenty of headroom.
For all Spurs will miss European income, their 2024-25 revenue would still have been £520million even if we strip out their Europa League prize money and home gate receipts from the competition, over £100m higher than every non-‘Big Six’ club, and around £30m higher than Chelsea’s turnover that year. SCR rules are pegged to revenue, so high-earning clubs like Spurs can spend far more than others. Non-football events generated £32.5m at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in 2024-25, more than the total matchday income of 11 Premier League clubs.
That helps explain how, alongside ever bigger transfer spending, Spurs in their post-Levy era (he surprisingly departed as chairman last September) are paying bigger wages. For years, they outperformed a wage bill that sat at the bottom of the Premier League’s ‘Big Six’. Recently, they have dramatically underperformed on that basis.
While owner funding and a low starting base for squad costs have given Tottenham plenty of spending scope, there is a limit to that.
As mentioned, it is unclear if more cash will need to be poured in; though it almost certainly will if Champions League football goes begging for too long. Also, player sales will take on added importance. Spurs’ shoddy transfer business of recent years has made that infertile ground. Even in 2023-24, when Harry Kane, a pure-profit academy graduate, went to Bayern Munich for a big fee, they collectively sold players for less than it had cost to buy those individuals.
There are signs of that changing.
Recouping £35million on Brennan Johnson when he went to Crystal Palace in January was seen internally as decent business, while the recent deal agreed to sell Luka Vuskovic to Brighton is better still. Vuskovic, who joined in summer 2025 for £12m but was without a Spurs first-team appearance to his name having spent last season out on loan, will head to the south coast for a guaranteed £46m, or only £6m less than went the opposite way for Van Hecke.
There are likely to be other sales this summer too, with Cristian Romero, Lucas Bergvall and Guglielmo Vicario among the players widely speculated as possible departees. The Athletic reported on Sunday evening that Radu Dragusin is set to join Fiorentina on a season-long loan, with the deal turning permanent should a minimum number of appearances be met.
Tottenham’s past reticence on transfers has brought this summer into sharper focus, though it’s also an outdated notion given they’ve been spending a lot on signings for a while now. Perhaps it stems from what we might term the club’s paradox of performance: when they spent (relatively) little, they did well on the pitch; since they’ve started splashing out, they’ve largely done badly.
Last year’s Europa League final triumph is the glaring outlier which proves the rule there, but for the most part, Spurs’ big spending has not translated to improved performance.
Such missteps have resulted in the club shifting away from the old self-sustaining model, and big funds are flowing from the owners.
They will strongly hope that money gets spent better than before.