Tottenham Hotspur will have a new man helping the club grow financially from next month, including finding a deal for those troublesome stadium naming rights.
football.london understands that Todd Kline is set to begin work next month as chief commercial officer in a new role at the north London club.
Spurs’ brand has been steadily growing in recent years with the improvement on the pitch under Mauricio Pochettino, their Champions League final appearance in 2019, the appointment of Jose Mourinho last year, the brief spell at Tottenham Hotspur Women of World Cup winner Alex Morgan and the construction of the £1.2bn complex that contains the state-of-the-art Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
Video Loading
Video Unavailable
Click to play
Tap to play
The video will auto-play soon8Cancel
Play now
The club’s 62,850-seater home has drawn praise from around the world for its hosting of Premier League and Champions League football as well as two successful NFL games, thanks to its retractable pitch system which reveals an artificial surface underneath.
Spurs chairman Daniel Levy has made no secret of the fact that he would like an NFL franchise to be based at Tottenham in the future, in what is the only purpose-built NFL stadium outside the USA.
The stadium was set to host Lady Gaga and Guns N’ Roses concerts and Capital’s Summertime Ball before the pandemic struck, as well as Anthony Joshua’s heavyweight title defence.
Despite all of the high profile events and the fact that the ground is at the forefront of stadiums across the world, Spurs have struggled to find a naming rights deal that suits them in the near two years since it opened.
That’s where Kline comes in and those naming rights will be part of a wide-ranging commercial role at the club, bringing together the responsibilities of staff who have left Spurs in recent months and consultant Simon Bamber who will move on in June when his contract ends.
The incoming American, a native of Swampscott, Massachusetts, will also be responsible for media rights and corporate partnerships but it is those stadium naming rights which will prove most lucrative and that’s where the new man has plenty of expertise.
Read More
Related Articles
Read More
Related Articles
Kline has previously been chief commercial officer at two NFL franchises, the Miami Dolphins and the Washington Football Team.
It was with the Dolphins that he spearheaded the team’s £180m 18-year stadium naming rights deal with Hard Rock in 2016, which was the third highest deal in NFL history at the time and brokered for only the 13th most valuable franchise in the sport at that point.
That deal was worth £10m a year for the Dolphins five years ago and Spurs are reportedly looking for £25m a year for someone to put their name on the huge Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
Tottenham are hoping that Kline will bring plenty of finance into the stadium and the club across various opportunities, with the naming rights just one part of his new job.
The American has previously worked at AEG, where he launched the Partnership Innovation group and created partnerships at AEG assets including Staples Center, L.A. LIVE and The 02 Arena in London.
Todd Kline spearheaded the £180m naming rights deal for the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami and he joins Tottenham next month
He has also worked for Players Inc, the licensing and marketing subsidiary of the NFL’s Players’ Association
For the past two years, Kline has worked for the New York-based talent agency WME (William Morris Endeavor), overseeing all of their sales work for sports talent clients, in addition to premium property sales work and naming rights.
Now he will be heading Tottenham in March, looking to bring all of his expertise across sports finance on both sides of the Atlantic into improving the financial health of the north London outfit, needed more than ever in the wake of the pandemic and the £600m debt the club must pay off for the stadium complex construction.
It might not be the new arrival the Spurs fans were hoping for this year, but Kline’s switch could end up being a crucial one for the long-term health of Tottenham Hotspur.
