Premier League club Tottenham Hotspur is rolling out a new venture program, Hotspur Labs, that will enable it to partner with early-stage companies that are not yet large enough to pursue a traditional sponsorship of the team. The program is being launched in partnership with London-based athlete venture capital firm The Players Fund.
Hotspur Labs will target startups in the Series A to Series C scale that can benefit from access to Tottenham’s assets while providing strategic value to the team. Tottenham is the first Premier League club to launch such a program. Tottenham CRO Ryan Norys explained that the new initiative is not a startup accelerator or incubator like other teams have pursued previously, but rather a means of allowing Tottenham to benefit from early-stage, venture-backed companies it otherwise would not have access to.
“It was designed to effectively diversify revenue beyond traditional sponsorship, but also create this platform where we could start to identify these early-stage, more founding teams or companies and bring them into our ecosystem,” Norys said. “For me, the real reason was how do we find an opportunity to start building relationships with these founding companies, and how do we bring them into our ecosystem and basically surround them with everything we do from a football perspective, and see how we can grow together.”
The program’s initial focus will include companies in commerce, fan experience, mobility, travel, sustainability and workplace culture. Norys noted that areas like athlete performance and other data applications may become a priority in the future. The team is currently in conversations with four companies, and Norys expects to announce the first deals over the next few months. Norys and Tottenham CTO Rob Pickering are the club’s lead executives on the initiative.
Partnerships will be structured on a deal-by-deal basis. Tottenham will typically provide access to team assets and internal systems in exchange for cash, equity, a mix of both or perhaps neither. “Ideally we find a structure in which there’s value exchange on both sides,” said Norys, who likened the overall approach to the team’s academy program, such that the early-stage companies can grow alongside the club. In an ideal scenario, a Hotspur Labs partner would eventually become a full-fledged team sponsor.
Norys pointed to the recent growth of companies in AI and automated rideshare as examples of businesses that Tottenham could have benefited from working with in recent years. Looking ahead, he’s open-minded on how to judge the venture program’s success.
“One, we’re looking to build the club’s future pipeline of companies, whether it’s sponsorship or not. … The other piece of it is a little bit of revenue growth, but not massive. When I went to get this approved by the board, there wasn’t an ROI attached to it,” Norys said. “But by nature, we’re going to build enterprise value for the football club and the stadium. We’re going to get better at how we operate, whether that’s fan-facing or just internally. And I think there are going to be a lot of intangible additives and incentives that we’re going to be able to achieve that we just don’t know about yet.”
Norys said he expects The Players Fund will vet inbounds from startups that want to work with the team as well as provide leads on companies it discovers through its venture fund. He also noted that the program may eventually add strategic partners with exposure to other parts of the globe.
The Players Fund’s involvement is through its newly revealed TPF Labs, a division dedicated to providing venture infrastructure for sports properties. It previously spearheaded the launch of an accelerator with Como 1907 and partnered on the latest iteration of Juventus’ innovation platform. TPF Labs is led by managing directors Flora Bell and Andy Marston.
