Enigmatic investors have much in common

Rory Smith, The Times Published at 12:01AM, March 2 2013 He is an enigmatic, almost silent figure. He is not expected to be at White Hart Lane tomorrow to watch the Barclays Premier League team in which he holds a majority stake take on their fiercest rivals. Instead, he will be watching from the other side of the Atlantic. Despite investing hundreds of millions of pounds in the club, he rarely attends matches. He is not even, by all accounts, a particularly passionate football fan. His sporting interests lie elsewhere: in golf, primarily. He counts some of the most famous names in that discipline including Tiger Woods and Ernie Els as friends. As of March 2012, he was estimated to be worth just short of $4 billion (about 2.6 billion); he occupied the 290th spot on Forbess list of the worlds richest individuals.

By and large, he delegates much of the day-to-day running of his team to a locum, but his philosophy is clear: he wants his side to be self-sufficient, to generate enough money not to need handouts from their billionaire benefactor. He believes a new stadium holds the key to unlocking their potential. Though the description fits almost to a T, he is not Stan Kroenke. Like most visceral nemeses, Arsenal and Tottenham have more in common than they might care to admit; more, certainly, than a simple, bilious enmity. Both go into tomorrows game knowing that defeat would be a considerable blow in their attempts to qualify for next seasons Champions League. Both have endured a number of seasons when they have been forced, by brute financial reality, to watch the jewels in their crown depart for richer pastures. And both are under the control of men who very rarely say a word. Joe Lewis, the foreign exchange billionaire who, through the ENIC investment group he runs with Daniel Levy, the Spurs chairman, owns 85 per cent of the North London club, is often described as reclusive. That, according to one person familiar with the Bow-born 76-year-old, is the journalistic shorthand of frustrated interviewers. How can he be reclusive, after all, when he is regularly spotted at the country club in Florida that he owns and where he also has a home and is a familiar face in Lyford Cay, the exclusive enclave on the Bahamas, where he spends much of his time? What is certain, though, is that Lewis does not talk to the press it aggravates him, according to his daughter, Vivienne and that he does not embroil himself in the granular detail of running Tottenham, the club he first bought a controlling stake in almost 12 years ago. That is not to say Lewis does not take an interest. He is believed to have played a key role in determining that Harry Redknapp, the clubs former manager, should not continue at White Hart Lane last summer, and Levy, his long-term protg, is thought to consult him on most matters of state.

It is Levy who is central in understanding why Tottenhams absentee landlord has not, in recent years, come under the pressure to make clear his intentions for the club that has been exerted on Kroenke, since the 65-year-old American real estate magnate took a majority hold in Arsenal almost two years ago. So rare are Kroenkes public utterances, of course, that he is known both here and in his homeland as Silent Stan. He is just as reticent to discuss his sporting interests in Colorado where he owns the Denver Nuggets NBA franchise, the Colorado Avalanche NHL team, the Pepsi Centre both call home and the Colorado Rapids, of Major League Soccer and Missouri, his home state, where he completed a takeover of the NFLs St Louis Rams in 2009. He stays behind the scenes, says Ryan Van Bibber, editor of the Turf Show Times, a site dedicated to the Rams. We have had a relatively short relationship with him, because he only took over for the 2010 season. He rarely makes public appearances. He cleaned house for the 2012 season and the Rams were far more successful than expected, so if they can stay on course, fans will be pleased [with him]. That is by no means the case with all of his sporting interests. Kroenke has come under pressure from supporters of a number of his teams either to invest more or to sell up. In the United States, where franchises are good enough to make public their wage bills, it is clear that Kroenke expects value for money. The Avalanche won the Stanley Cup in the first year of his reign, but are the lowest but one payers in the NHL; the $40.62 million they paid last year is almost half that spent by the Philadelphia Flyers, the leagues most extravagant employers. The Nuggets fare a little better, coming in seventeenth out of 30 in the NBA. The Rams, meanwhile, have the 30th-highest salary chitty in the NFL. There are 32 teams. Like their counterparts across the Atlantic, Arsenal supporters want to know whether Kroenke is prepared to spend enough to bring success. His silence, though, troubles them. At least Spurs have an idea whose hand is on the tiller, and that is down to Levy.

The 51-year-old may be caricatured as a hard-nosed bargain seeker, the pantomime villain of transfer deadline day, but that he has a piercingly sharp business mind cannot be in question. Yes, Spurs sell their best players, but only at premium prices and on their terms; the idea of Levy letting a player run his contract down to its last year before being corralled into allowing him to leave is laughable. The same cannot be said of his closest equivalent at Arsenal, Ivan Gazidis. The perception is that Levy, unlike Gazidis, exercises real power. Lewis invested in Tottenham on his advice; Levy has a share in the club, too, and it is he who has done much to set Spurs path. Just like his mentor, he does not speak regularly, either. That is the difference, though: it is not silence that is the problem, as long as you are present, and somewhere, saying the things that matter. Tale of the money clip JOE LEWIS Age: 76 Worth: $3.8bn (2012) Forbes Rich List: 290 Left school at 15 to work in the family caf before expanding the business into a chain of restaurants, but it was foreign exchange trading that made him rich, most notably betting against the pound on Black Wednesday. STAN KROENKE Age: 65 Worth: $3.2bn (2012) Forbes Rich List: 358 The son of a lumberyard owner, Kroenke studied for an MBA, simultaneously running a clothing business. He sold that, and moved into real estate. Through Kroenke Group and THF Realty, he has interests in apartment buildings, stockyards and supermarkets.