Getty Images
Since opening its doors in 2019, Tottenham Hotspur Stadium has hosted everything from Beyoncé concerts and heavyweight boxing fights to American football and rugby union games. There is even a 500-metre Formula One-themed go karting track running under the 62,000-seater venue’s South Stand.
Indeed, the stadium now generates millions of visits each year from attendees whose passions and interests might extend beyond the 19 Premier League games held at the venue every season, making it a potentially attractive commercial asset for brands whose target audience isn’t exclusively the hardcore soccer fanbase.
According to Ryan Norys, Tottenham’s chief revenue officer, that was part of the motivation for launching The Collective, a new sponsorship programme that will allow partners to bring tailored activations to every stand at the venue.
Norys has worked on similar stadium sponsorship concepts during his time at MetLife Stadium, which is home to the New York Jets and Giants, and the Miami Dolphins’ Hard Rock Stadium. However, he points out that both of those US venues were designed with the intention of integrating sponsors from the start, whereas Tottenham Hotspur Stadium was not.
Tottenham’s commercial team therefore spent “countless hours” walking around the stadium alongside architecture and design firm F3 to identify how the club could carve out new inventory and integrate brands into different spaces without taking away from the aesthetics of the venue.
The idea was to create an offering that allows sponsors to embed themselves within the event experience with a “sense of ownership”, rather than running more traditional activations such as sampling activity outside the ground.
“We want to be first movers,” Norys tells SportsPro. “There’s no other stadium in the UK that can launch The Collective the way we have, because we have a stadium that’s built for purpose, we have a lot of different events that come, but also, more importantly, we have the clubs and the spaces and the retail and the restaurants that can support it.”
The NFL is part of a growing calendar of non-soccer events now held at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium (Image credit: Getty Images)
Global visibility and “hand to hand combat”
In September, Sports Illustrated Tickets (SIT) was the first company to take up the new commercial opportunity in a 12-year deal described as an ‘official fan experience’ partnership, which also designates the Sports Illustrated media brand as an inaugural member of The Collective.
The agreement covers the stadium’s East Stand and includes sponsorship of a 3,000-capacity hospitality area called Club SI, while the venue’s premium Lower East Side bar will be rebranded as The Cover Club in a nod to Sports Illustrated’s cover archive. Another activation will see the launch of Defining Moments, an interactive exhibition created with the magazine’s covers, stories and photography, which will allow fans to scan a QR code to access exclusive digital content, stories and rewards.
Though the deal does not include naming rights to the stand itself, future members of The Collective sponsoring the other three stands can expect access to a similar package of rights, according to Norys, who says the only unknown for now is how each partner is going to activate the opportunity.
Rather than joining the likes of AIA in Tottenham’s top sponsorship tier or official partners like HSBC, Salesforce and HPE, members of The Collective will essentially sit under a new portfolio of stadium sponsors. Norys points out that a brand could feasibly choose to only align with the venue without securing any rights associated with the soccer team, though describes that scenario as “not ideal”.
As the club looks to add to its deal with SIT, Norys says one approach is to pursue brands whose target audience aligns with the fan demographics of a particular stand. He also uses the example of potentially having a sponsor whose colour scheme aligns with one of the areas that Tottenham have on the market.
One option could be to upsell some of Spurs’ existing commercial partners, but there is also an extensive list of categories that Norys believes would be a good fit for The Collective, including “any brand that has a consumer product”, banking, automotive, airlines and B2B companies.
“There’s a lot of big ones,” he says. “It really has to be those that are trying to achieve global visibility but also care about what I call hand-to-hand combat, where you’re actually creating this one-to-one relationship with people that come to the stadium.”
Why naming rights value “still holds up”
Some onlookers might assume that Tottenham’s decision to roll out a new stadium sponsorship programme means that selling the naming rights to the venue is no longer a priority for the club. However, Norys says that a stadium naming rights deal remains “very much on the table” and adds that those conversations are continuing alongside sales efforts for The Collective as part of one go-to-market strategy.
Multiple brands have been linked with the stadium’s most premium asset both before and after the ground was completed, with initial reports suggesting that Spurs had set an asking price of UK£25 million (US$32.8 million). Whether or not that target remains the same, the general view is that naming rights become a harder sell after a new venue opens and becomes known by its unsponsored identity.
Speaking now, though, over six years after the venue opened its doors, Norys says he believes the naming rights are even more valuable today because of the stadium’s extensive calendar of events.
“I think a lot of the value still holds up and, if anything, I think it’s actually worth more now than five years ago,” he continues.
“The reality of it is, when the stadium was built, even though the club had always said we were going to have all these different events, because it had never been done before, there were probably a lot of people that had doubts. Then Covid hit and put these other events outside of football even more in doubt, because people couldn’t even visit the stadium.
“I think what you’re seeing now is the fruits of the labour for all of the hard work that has been put in over the last several years. So the fact that we’ve shown people that we can do it, and then we’re going to follow it up with an equally as good 2026, brands are going to start looking at it and saying, ‘hey, this really is a global entertainment destination. It’s not just a football stadium. Everything that they said they were going to do they’re doing.’
“We would have never anticipated F1 Drive two years ago. So when you’re able to pair F1, the NFL and Tottenham Hotspur Football Club in the same venue, it really is unique.”
Tottenham will look to fit members of The Collective with the demographics of each stand to help sponsors reach their target audience (Image credit: Getty Images)
Norys also doesn’t think that the introduction of The Collective dilutes the value of a potential naming rights deal, pointing out that the programme was designed to ensure that there were still enough assets and rights for a sponsor to take on the venue’s lead asset.
“I certainly don’t expect any devaluation, because the package that we would have put in front of someone two, three years ago, for the most part, still exists today,” he says. “What we’ve done is take The Collective and separate it out. So I don’t anticipate at all that the stadium naming rights is going to be devalued in the sense of the value that we deliver.
“I know there’s a lot of media reports around what the proposed asking fee was. I wouldn’t necessarily say that those are all valid or relevant today, but I would say that the actual value that stadium naming rights delivers for Tottenham Hotspur Stadium certainly hasn’t lost its value.”
Closing the commercial gap
If Tottenham were able to finally secure a naming rights partner, it would be among the club’s most lucrative sponsorships. But even though that deal has evaded Spurs up to now, the North Londoners have still made significant commercial gains in recent years.
According to Norys, Manchester City are the only top-flight club to have delivered more commercial growth than Tottenham over the last decade, while he also claims that Spurs have seen the highest commercial growth percentage of any Premier League team in the last three years.
Tottenham’s most recent annual report shows that commercial revenue grew from UK£227.8 million (US$298.7 million) to UK£244.7 million (US$320.8 million) during the 2024 financial year, which is more than the club generated from TV and media rights income. That wasn’t the case in 2019, when Spurs’ commercial income stood at UK£135.2 million (US$177.3 million).
Unsurprisingly, Norys credits the stadium as one of the key growth drivers, but he also says there has been a concentrated effort on sponsorship, which has included a focus on monetising first-party data, freeing up LED inventory and maximising the club’s digital assets.
As a result, sponsorship revenue for 2024 grew slightly from UK£141.3 million (US$185.3 million) to UK£144.5 million (US$189.5 million). That is a significant increase on 2017/2018, the last full season before the stadium opened, when Spurs generated UK£93.5 million (US$122.6 million) from sponsorship and corporate hospitality.
After adding the likes of Alipay, BetMGM and Kraken to their portfolio in recent years, Tottenham’s official website now lists 26 partners for the men’s team and 18 deals covering the women’s side, in addition to five official suppliers and nine stadium suppliers.
Even so, Norys believes there’s still “significant” room for growth in the club’s portfolio, which will include a new main shirt sponsor from the 2027/28 season, when insurance firm AIA is transitioning to the team’s training kit.
From a commercial perspective, Tottenham are already outperforming rivals Arsenal and Chelsea. Armed with a fully operational multi-use stadium and a new sponsorship proposition, Norys says the next step is to close the gap to Liverpool, Manchester United and Manchester City, with the overall aim of generating enough revenue to reinvest back into the team.
“When you look at the three-year revenue strategy, without telling you where we’re going to get to, it’s double-digit figure growth,” Norys says. “The most important thing is that we have the assets to deliver against that.
“Three years ago, when I got here, that wasn’t the case. But because we started to unbundle some of these deals that we had previously, we’ve restructured a lot of partnerships when we’ve gone back to the market, we’ve utilised a wider digital influence.
“Three years ago, less than ten per cent of our partnerships had digital inventory or digital assets. We’re now over 20 to 25 per cent, and we have carved out and brought back a lot more LED into the ecosystem, which is almost integral to any football club partnership. I don’t want to say we have it in abundance, but we’re very strategic in how many minutes we deliver for what value, and that’s allowed us the flexibility to grow.
“So there’s not anything that we need to do in the next two to three years except for just execute the strategy. We have the assets, we have the tools, and we have the resources.”
Ryan Norys, chief revenue officer at Tottenham Hotspur, will be speaking on-stage at SportsPro Media Summit in Madrid, which takes place on 18th and 19th November. To find out more about the event, click here.