Tottenham Hotspur’s perilous league position with just two Premier League games remaining means that minds are focused firmly on what’s happening on the pitch. Right now, the only question that matters is whether Roberto De Zerbi can maintain the improvement of the last few weeks and guide Spurs to safety.
But there is another set of questions facing the club, even ones that are not as immediate as the question of which division they will be playing in next season. And those questions concern the ownership of the club, and particularly the majority-shareholding Lewis family.
Daniel Levy’s sudden dismissal last September put the Lewis family in the spotlight like never before. Without Levy there to run the club and act as the lightning rod for criticism, more questions have been asked of the Lewis family regarding their long-term plans.
Throughout, the Lewis family have been very clear that they do not want to sell up. The last widely-reported enquiry into the acquisition of the club came from a consortium led by Brooklyn Earick last September, which led to a source close to the Lewis family dismissing it as “unsolicited and unnecessary interest”.
But whatever happens over the last two games of this season, the question of the Lewis family’s long-term intentions for Tottenham Hotspur won’t go away for long. Especially with fans aghast at the struggles of the club this season, facing the fear of their first relegation for 50 years. The Lewis family’s position, that the club is not for sale, is steadfast, regardless of which division Spurs are playing in next season.
There is another potential factor regarding the ownership of the club worth considering. And that is ENIC granting themselves ‘warrants’ to acquire extra shares, at the cost of diluting the club’s 30,000 minority shareholders.
First issued in June 2022 when ENIC injected £100million (then $124.7m) into Spurs, the warrants grant ENIC the option to buy up further shares in the club at no extra cost. The warrants previously equated to five per cent of club shares as at the June 2022 issue date, but ‘step up’ by 1.5 per cent annually between March 2025 and June 2032. At that point, assuming all of those annual step-ups take place, the warrants will comprise 15.5 per cent of Spurs’ June 2022 capital base.
So why does this matter? The accounts state that these warrants are only converted “on a change of control”. Put simply, if ENIC were to sell, these warrants would be cashed out, effectively granting them a sweetener or a bonus on top of the money they would get for their majority shareholding.
But given that these warrants have only been awarded to ENIC, they effectively come at the cost of the minority shareholders. The creation of the warrants has a dilutive effect on the entire shareholding, as it creates what is in effect a separate pot of shares. But that pot will belong — at a change of control — entirely to ENIC.
The minority shareholders — of which there are roughly 30,000 — currently own 12.38 per cent of the shareholding of Tottenham Hotspur Limited, i.e. the part that is not owned by ENIC. Many of those shareholders — some estimate as many as half — only own one share each. Their prime motivation is not financial, not expecting a return on their investment or dividends, but rather romantic: they want to own a small part of the club that they support.
Existing minority shareholders do have the option to sell their shares on Asset Match, an online trading platform. Asset Match runs auctions in Spurs shares every two months.
That minority shareholding could be very valuable.
If we take Forbes’ 2024 enterprise valuation of Tottenham Hotspur of £2.6billion and deduct £793m in net debt, the club’s equity was valued at £1.8bn. A 12.38 per cent share of that — the sum proportion of today’s minority shareholdings — was deemed to be worth £225m. If the enterprise value of the club were higher at, say, £3bn, the minority shareholders’ proportion of the equity element would be worth £273m.
But the issue is that those minority shareholders are currently in a weak position. They have no protections (such as anti-dilution rights), no board rights, and no rights to dividends. Nor have they ever been offered the chance to participate in any of the capital injections through which ENIC has invested money in recent years.
In recent years, even before the warrants kicked in, the minority shareholders have seen themselves steadily diluted by ENIC.
In May 2022, at the end of the season when Antonio Conte guided Spurs into fourth, ENIC injected that £100m. By creating new shares, ENIC increased their shareholding from 85.55 per cent to 86.58 per cent. Then, in December 2024, ENIC bought another £35m of shares, increasing their stake to 86.91 per cent. In October 2025, a few weeks after Levy’s dismissal, another £100m injection came in, upping ENIC’s stake to 87.62 per cent. The 12.38 per cent currently held by minority shareholders is already down by 2.07 per cent since early 2022.
There is nothing unusual about a majority shareholder increasing their stake in this way. They are the ones who put the money in, after all. But the minorities were never given the option to participate in any of this. They have already seen their holding reduced by the three ENIC injections in the last four years. And now they face the prospect of further dilution by the warrants.
The combination of those two things means that if the warrants grow up to their cap of 15.5 per cent of the June 2022 base by 2032, the combined minority stakes will be worth less than 11 per cent by then. That sounds like a small decrease but, at the valuations bandied about for Spurs, it translates to a significant transfer in value away from minority shareholders.
Based on that earlier Forbes valuation, the minority shareholders’ interest in the club’s equity value would total an estimated £196m — £29m less than at their current ownership stake. The gap only widens as the valuation of Spurs rises: at the higher enterprise value, where equity is valued at £2.2bn, the ‘lost’ value to minority owners hits £34m. On either calculation, the warrants have the effect of transferring value year-on-year from the minority shareholders to ENIC, for which the former will never be compensated. That £34m divided by 30,000 equates to over £1,100 each: or three-quarters of the price of a Tottenham season ticket.
The picture for minority shareholders may be about to get even worse. Tottenham are currently governed by the Takeover Code, a regulation that oversees publicly-traded companies in the UK. Under Rule 9 of the code, anyone who acquires at least 30 per cent of a company must make an offer to all remaining shareholders at the highest price paid in the last 12 months. So, hypothetically, if ENIC were to sell, the minorities could sell as well. But Tottenham are viewed as a ‘Transition Company’ by the panel, and so on February 2, 2027, their protections will fall away. This means that any potential buyer would be under no obligation to offer the minority shareholders anything if they acquired ENIC’s stake. Potentially leaving the minority shareholders as an illiquid rump.
“There’s not much point from a financial perspective in owning illiquid shares in a company where one group or entity can essentially do what they like,” says one shareholder, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Your investment then is stuck.”