London club, whose tenancy of former Olympic stadium is propped up by public money, face catastrophic losses if they go down
23 January 2026 6:00am GMT
Since the Coronavirus pandemic passed, they have been released almost like clockwork. Each year, no later than the middle of January, the group of companies’ accounts for Company Registration Number 5993863 have been filed with Companies House. Yet, as of Friday morning, there was no sign of WH Holding Limited having lodged its annual report and financial statements for the year ending May 31, 2025.
WH Holding Limited – it does not take much guessing – is the ultimate parent company of West Ham United Football Club Limited, which has been later than usual filing its full accounts for the same period. In fact, Telegraph Sport has been told not to expect either submission to be made until at least next month, at the end of which they must be published by law.
It would not be the first time a football club have left it late before fulfilling their legal obligations, particularly if the figures make for grim reading, and there has been speculation that West Ham may have posted a loss last season in the region of £100m.
The club did not respond to requests for comment on those rumours but, one thing is for certain, their financial outlook will become even bleaker if they fail to save themselves from Premier League relegation after their latest set of accounts are due.
Baroness Brady will be back on The Apprentice next week and, according to the show’s profile of the West Ham vice-chair, the club are currently worth £1bn and are the 14th-most valuable team in the world.
It is a claim US president and original Apprentice star Donald Trump might brand another example of “fake news” after Telegraph Sport found no evidence to support a figure higher than the £800m at which Baroness Brady’s own website has valued West Ham since 2020.
That figure remained unaltered after Daniel Kretinsky bought a 27 per cent stake for about £180m (valuing them at £666m) the following year, shortly after Forbes said West Ham were worth £459m.
In fairness to karrenbrady.com, that number had almost doubled by May last year to £840m. Only the Premier League’s so-called “big six” were deemed worthy of a higher valuation in a list on which the club’s inclusion owed everything to their membership of the world’s richest league.
No team worth more than $1bn (£740m) have ever been relegated to the Championship, meaning West Ham are facing hundreds of millions of pounds being wiped off their value overnight, the biggest such fall in the history of the game.
That is primarily down to losing what is a guaranteed £100m-plus in prize money merely for being in the Premier League, with Southampton earning £109.2m last season despite finishing bottom with just 12 points and winning only two matches.
Most of that prize money came from the league’s £1.7bn-a-year domestic television deals with Sky Sports and TNT Sports and total overseas broadcast contracts thought to be at least as valuable.
West Ham will not lose all of that thanks to the league’s much-debated parachute payments to relegated clubs, particularly in the following season. Last term, Luton Town, Burnley and Sheffield United received an estimated £49m in such payments after they went down, on top of whatever they got from playing in the Championship.
Leeds United’s accounts for the year ending June 30, 2024, are arguably the best barometer of what West Ham could face after they went down themselves at the end of 2022-23. What Leeds’s accounts describe as “central distributions” almost halved from £94.1m to £51m during their first season in the Championship, with their TV and broadcasting income dropping from £17.4m to just £2.6m. Their overall turnover slumped by almost a third from £189.7m to £127.6m.
West Ham are in danger of suffering an even further fall, with the latest Deloitte Football Money League this week estimating they turned over £240m last season. That would be down significantly on the £269.7m from the previous campaign, when they made a £52.7m profit after qualifying for the Europa League courtesy of their historic 2023 Conference League triumph.
Leeds managed to increase their gate receipts while in the Championship but the fan mutiny to engulf Brady and largest shareholder David Sullivan would appear to make doing the same almost impossible if West Ham end up hosting the likes of Lincoln City next season rather than Manchester United.
According to Deloitte, West Ham’s match-day revenue last season was £41m, less than a third of Liverpool’s despite the London club boasting a bigger home ground. That is largely down to them not owning their own stadium, which has also cost them millions in non-football revenue from events such as summer concerts, as well as the chance to negotiate a multi-million-pound naming-rights deal.
That said, their rent at the former Olympic Stadium will infamously halve from around £4.4m in the event of relegation at the expense of taxpayers who have lost millions of pounds propping up the venue since the 2012 Games.
The most recent annual report of operator E20 Stadium LLP for the year ending March 31, 2024, stated the London Stadium had lost almost £1m a week (£51.3m). The report also forecast future losses of £206.7m, a figure that could rise further if West Ham are relegated. Each of the club’s home matches costs the taxpayer more than £100,000 and they would play four more home league games in the Championship than the Premier League.
West Ham’s accounts for the year ending May 31, 2024 openly acknowledge the profit they made that season was largely the result of selling captain Declan Rice to Arsenal for a club-record £105m. But the accounts also show they owed more than £190m in transfer fees in that same period, £100m of which was payable by June 30 last year.
The Rice money has been squandered in the last two seasons, which have seen £125m and £170m spent respectively, including on big-money flops like Niclas Füllkrug and Maximilian Kilman. Luckily, those fees can be spread over the length of the signings’ contracts, unlike the £130m West Ham have brought in over the same period. But they still face having to pay off those transfers in the coming seasons.
All this will make keeping the likes of captain Jarrod Bowen at the club much more difficult if they are relegated this year. They would be in danger of losing any player who could attract a Premier League suitor and the club may not stand in the way of someone who could command a big transfer fee or enable them to cut their wage bill.
Transfer business since July 2023
It is telling that they are already trying to maximise the transfer value of one of their biggest assets, Lucas Paquetá, being willing to sell him to Flamengo before the January window closes provided he is loaned straight back for the remainder of the season.
They are not thought to be at any immediate risk of failing Premier League or English Football League cost-control rules but a season in the Championship would not make complying any easier. There are also examples aplenty of the vicious spiral into which a big club can be drawn if they spend more than one season outside the top flight.
The true scale of West Ham’s long-term transfer deficit will become clearer when they finally publish their accounts from last season, presumably before the February 28 deadline. Then again, the confirmation statement (formerly known as an annual return) for Company Registration Number 5993863 was due on January 12. And that was filed eight days late on Tuesday.
