On Monday afternoon, the news every Marseille fan was waiting for finally arrived.
No, it wasn’t the confirmation that Georges-Kevin N’Koudou will be a Tottenham player or that Clinton N’Jié will go the other way (although we’re still waiting for either of those to materialise), but it was the news that their club was going to change ownership.
After years of having Vincent Labrune and Margarita Louis-Dreyfus drag the club down (despite a brief resurgence under Marcelo Bielsa), the club announced Frank McCourt, former owner of the LA Dodgers, would take over towards the end of the year.
The controversial businessman doesn’t have the best reputation in Los Angeles after the baseball franchise filed for bankruptcy in 2011, which led him to then sell it in 2012 for $2bn.
Spirits are higher than they previously were in Marseille, but there remains a shroud of doubt as to whether or not the same will happen at the French club.
This, however, could have all been Tottenham, according to Challenges in France.
The weekly business magazine claims that in 2014, Frank McCourt was seriously thinking about buying Tottenham, which led to talks with Daniel Levy.
(Un?)fortunately for the London club, the American businessman was put off by the Tottenham chairman’s request of €1bn (£852.2m) to buy the club from ENIC.
Since then, Tottenham’s value is only likely to have risen. The new TV deal, stadium redevelopment, and qualifying for the Champions League all means that anyone who fancies buying Spurs in the future will almost certainly be looking at more than the previous quote.
Did Spurs dodge a bullet? We’ll have to wait and see how Mr McCourt handles a football club first.
