Amanda Staveley first set foot in St James’ Park in October 2017 partly on a mission to – in her own words – “piss off” the owners of Liverpool after a failed takeover bid a few years before.
She was officially on the guest list as an associate of Newcastle United manager Rafael Benitez and her timing was opportune.
With Mike Ashley apparently open to offers for a club where his ownership had become acrimonious, Staveley’s appearance was deliberately signposted to journalists to set in motion a takeover process that took four years to complete.
The British businesswoman has been linked with a bid to buy Tottenham Hotspur (Photo: Getty)
Few could argue that Staveley was anything other than a wildly successful co-owner of Newcastle, alongside her husband Mehrdad Ghodoussi.
But it is the sheer number of obstacles that she overcame to finally get her hands on the keys at St James’ Park that are the biggest hint to what comes next in her bid to broker a takeover of Tottenham Hotspur.
Officially, of course, she is now out of the running. A statement to the London Stock Exchange on Monday confirmed that they “do not intend to make an offer for Tottenham” and, due to the rules of the UK takeover code, she cannot return with a bid for six months.
But few familiar with Staveley’s dogged and determined pursuit of Newcastle, a club she says she “fell in love with” after that first visit to St James’ Park, will buy that it is the end of the matter. And the Magpies’ takeover shows that the 52-year-old is not someone to be underestimated.
In many ways the hurdles she now faces are similar to those she encountered at Newcastle. Enic and the Lewis family are long-term owners who look to be approaching their sell-by date in north London, something that could definitely be said of Ashley in 2017.
Defenestrating Daniel Levy feels like their final roll of the dice, a deliberate and very public prodding of the reset button on their stewardship which has been followed by a PR push suggesting fresh impetus, ambition and finance will flow the club’s way.
Publicly they don’t want to sell and the suspicion was that Ashley, deep down and despite his protestations to the contrary, wasn’t especially interested in doing so either.
But by registering a preliminary interest in a takeover of Tottenham – triggering the process by which her firm had to release Monday’s statement – it feels like the financier is playing the long game, just as she did with Newcastle.
Just like Ashley did, Enic will have a number that will turn its head. Some believe that to be close to £3.5bn, which would be one of the biggest buyouts in English football history.
There is scepticism at Spurs that she is the woman to do that, just as there was at Newcastle, where one insider branded her a “tyre kicker” and “time waster” after initial efforts to engage Ashley failed. There was definitely a feeling at the time that all she really wanted with Newcastle was cheap PR to fund other projects.
But the truth was there were machinations behind-the-scenes, where Staveley used connections and personal relationships to get her ducks in a row before a Saudi Arabia-backed bid that forced Ashley to take her very seriously indeed. Plenty who wrote her off were forced to quietly concede that she was a serious figure after all.
Staveley certainly moves in the sort of circles that would enable her to pull together the finance for a bid for Spurs and perhaps the first expression of interest is a sign to them that she is serious while further efforts are conducted in secret.
If Tottenham’s form blows up and the Enic reset fails, Staveley has already shown that she is ready to step in. And given her success at Newcastle, it might well feel like a decent alternative to Spurs fans.
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Sources at PCP International Finance Limited were saying little on Monday and they are now bound by the rules of the takeover panel so their room for maneouvre is limited. But there is still a resolve to buy the club and they are certainly not suggesting this is the end of things.
The i Paper has been told the money behind her bid comes largely from the United States and not from Qatar, which sources in the football industry believe also has a long-standing interest in Tottenham.
Part of the art of assembling a bid for a Premier League football club is proving to people with serious money that you are a serious person. So getting her name out there doesn’t hurt Staveley’s chances of retaining her potential investors for a future tilt at Tottenham down the line.
When Staveley left Newcastle in 2024, friends felt she was unlikely to be finished with the game. She told The Athletic in an interview that she needed to keep working, that being busy was good for her health (she has Hodgkinson’s disease, a degenerative condition of the brain). For now, Tottenham interest is parked – but history tells us that might not be the end of the story.