Who Funds West Ham Now? Ownership, Liquidity and the New Spending Rules

The pre-emption clause has decided the ownership battle

When The Pyramid examined West Ham's ownership structure in August, Amanda Staveley's agreement to acquire the Gold family's 25.1% holding appeared to have opened a route into the club. The complication was that West Ham's existing shareholders held pre-emption rights, entitling them to buy those shares themselves, on the terms offered to the outside party, before any sale could complete. By the 5.30pm deadline on Thursday 3 September, they had done so.

The outcome is expected to leave Křetínský with around 46% of WH Holding Limited, up from 27%, while Sullivan moves from 38.8% to approximately 40% and Tripp Smith, whose interest is held through WHU LLC, rises from 8% to around 11%. The final structure involves more than a pro-rata division of the Gold holding: Křetínský is reported to have agreed further purchases from Sullivan and other shareholders in order to arrive at the intended percentages. It completes an unusual sequence, in which a transaction that would have taken him to roughly 43% earlier this summer failed to complete, Staveley then agreed to buy the entire Gold interest, and the pre-emption process pulled the existing shareholders back into a deal they had previously allowed to pass.

Křetínský is set to become West Ham's largest shareholder. That is not the same as West Ham receiving money.

Buying West Ham is not the same as funding West Ham

West Ham's shares are held through WH Holding Limited, company number 05993863, the parent of West Ham United Football Club Limited. The Gold family's 25.1% holding has reportedly been valued at around £150m, implying an equity valuation of roughly £600m for the parent; The Times has reported that figure in connection with Staveley's proposed acquisition, and it should be treated as reported rather than confirmed.

Whatever the number, a secondary purchase of existing shares is not a recapitalisation. Consideration paid to an existing shareholder goes to that shareholder. It does not reach WH Holding's bank account and cannot be spent on transfers, wages or operating costs. Fresh capital enters a company when it issues new shares, borrows, or receives a shareholder loan — not when two shareholders trade an existing holding between themselves. The transaction just completed determines who owns the club. A separate set of decisions, none of which has yet been disclosed, will determine who funds it.

The accounts predate the real shock

WH Holding's latest published accounts cover the year ended 31 May 2025 and were filed at Companies House on 27 February 2026. West Ham reported turnover of £227.6m and a pre-tax loss of £104.2m, against a £57.2m profit the year before — a reversal driven by lower player-sale profits, higher amortisation, a lower Premier League finish and the absence of European football.

The deterioration also reached the balance sheet. WH Holding moved from £99.2m of net assets at May 2024 to £4.3m of net liabilities at May 2025, while net current liabilities widened to £165.5m, with £38.8m of current assets set against £204.3m of creditors falling due within a year. A single season removed the company's entire book equity.

Total employment costs reached £175.9m, comprising £152.9m of wages and salaries, £22.6m of social-security costs and £329,000 of other pension costs. The pension figure is small because it captures only defined-contribution schemes outside the Football League Limited Pension and Life Assurance Scheme, in which eligible staff participate; a separate £1.6m liability remained at the year end for West Ham's share of the historic Football League pension-scheme deficit.

These are Premier League numbers describing a Premier League business. They do not show the Championship revenue base now confronting the club, and they incorporate none of the subsequent player sales or ownership changes. West Ham do not have a £104.2m relegation hole; that is a historical loss from a completed financial year. What the accounts establish is narrower and more useful: the club entered its relegation season already loss-making, with book equity gone and current liabilities more than five times current assets.

The Championship changed its rules in May

The regime governing what West Ham can spend changed three months before they arrived in it.

Until this season, EFL Championship clubs were assessed under Profitability and Sustainability rules, which capped aggregate losses across a rolling three-year period and were tested after the fact. At the EFL annual general meeting on 15 May 2026, Championship clubs voted to replace P&S with Squad Cost Rules from 2026/27, having run the new framework in shadow through the preceding season. The terminology is worth pinning down, because three labels are in circulation: PSR is the Premier League's, P&S was the EFL's, and both leagues are now moving to squad cost frameworks.

SCR does something structurally different from what it replaces. Rather than limiting losses, it limits spending on player and manager-related costs, including transfer fees, to a set percentage of income — 85% for 2026/27. Owner equity can lift that allowance, but only by up to £15m in a single season and £33m across three years. That is a cap on how much fresh equity can enlarge the permitted spend; it is not a cap on the spend itself, which is governed by the 85% of qualifying income and will be a much larger figure. The EFL has also moved to in-season monitoring rather than retrospective assessment, so compliance is tested while a transfer window is open rather than adjudicated two summers later.

The consequence for West Ham is precise. Křetínský's capacity to fund the business is not seriously in question, and shareholder money can keep the company liquid without limit. But the route from owner equity to squad expenditure is metered, and it is metered at £15m a season. Everything above that has to be earned rather than subscribed.

Four sources of financing, not one

Public discussion collapses all of this into a single idea — that an owner has put money into a club. West Ham demonstrate why that is too coarse, because four distinct sources of financing are in play and each behaves differently.

Share purchases. Money paid for existing shares changes the ownership of WH Holding and does nothing else. It does not recapitalise the company, does not appear as income, and has no effect whatsoever on what West Ham can spend.

Player sales. These generate cash and, depending on the remaining book value of the player, substantial accounting profits. Under SCR they may also do something more valuable. Because the Championship framework is income-based, player trading can increase the base against which the 85% allowance is calculated. The EFL has not yet published the full rules, so the precise definition of qualifying player-sale income — and therefore the size of the effect — cannot yet be calculated. But the direction is clear, and it inverts the intuition that selling good players is purely a retreat.

Mateus Fernandes illustrates the scale. West Ham signed him from Southampton in August 2025 on a five-year contract, with Sky Sports reporting an initial fee of £38m plus £4m in add-ons. A transfer fee is capitalised and written off across the length of the contract — amortisation — so a player's book value falls each year regardless of what he is worth on the open market. Taking £38m as the cost and assuming, purely for illustration, straight-line amortisation over five years, the remaining book value after roughly one season would be around £30m. Tottenham's reported £85m could therefore produce an accounting profit in the region of £55m, before add-ons, transaction costs, the sell-on clause Southampton were reported to have secured on the original sale (the percentage has not been disclosed), and West Ham's own accounting treatment. That is an illustration rather than a figure reported by WH Holding, and it should not be plugged into an SCR calculation until the qualifying-income definition is published. Crysencio Summerville followed to Al-Hilal in a package Sky Sports reported at £55m guaranteed plus £5m in bonuses, taking guaranteed proceeds from the two sales to roughly £140m.

Fresh shareholder equity. This is real money entering the business, and it can cover any operating shortfall. Its effect on squad spending is the constrained one described above.

Financing and accelerated receivables. This is the pool most often overlooked, and the audited accounts set it out plainly. WH Holding recorded £22.0m of interest and similar expenses in FY25, including £15.2m of implied interest on transfer fees payable over extended terms — a non-cash entry that discounts deferred consideration — and £4.1m of other finance costs, of which £4.0m related to accelerating transfer fees receivable. In other words, West Ham were paying both to defer money going out and to bring future money coming in forward.

That reframes the £195.8m owed to other clubs at 31 May 2025. It is not a passive creditor balance. West Ham have been buying players on extended terms while simultaneously selling future receipts forward for cash today, and the transfer market has become part of the club's financing architecture rather than merely the place where it trades. The £22.0m charge is the price of running it that way.

The scale of that architecture grew after the balance-sheet date, though before relegation. The accounts disclose that West Ham renewed a £40m Barclays overdraft on 10 July 2025 and, on 28 July 2025, entered a new five-year £124m facility with Rights and Media Funding, a specialist lender to football clubs that advances against future media, commercial and transfer receipts. By the date the accounts were signed, £89m of that facility had been drawn.

That last figure answers the question in this article's headline more directly than any ownership percentage. Before Křetínský's move, West Ham were already being funded by four sets of counterparties: the clubs buying their players, the financiers buying their receivables, Barclays, and Rights and Media Funding.

The parachute sets the clock

Relegation brings its own income, and under SCR that income does more work than it used to. Parachute payments are calculated as a share of the equal distribution of Premier League broadcast revenue: 55% in the first year after relegation, 45% in the second and 20% in the third, the third year being available only to clubs that spent more than one season in the top flight. West Ham, relegated after a long unbroken run in the Premier League, qualify for the full three-year structure for as long as they remain in the Championship. The final distributable equal-share figure for 2026/27 has not been settled, so we are not going to estimate the cheque.

The mechanism matters more than the amount. Under the old rules, parachute income improved a relegated club's loss position. Under SCR it enters the income base directly, and 85% of a larger number is a larger permitted spend. That is a structural advantage over Championship clubs without parachute income, and one the new framework formalises rather than corrects.

It also imposes a schedule. The largest single component of West Ham's SCR income base is contracted to fall by ten percentage points next year and by a further twenty-five the year after. A squad assembled for the Premier League must therefore become cheaper on a timetable set by the Premier League, whether or not the football goes well. That is the real case for spending aggressively now: not that promotion is desirable, but that the permitted spend is at its maximum this season and declines from here. The counter-case is the obvious one. Spend into the parachute and fail, and the club faces a shrinking allowance with a smaller squad, servicing costs on £124m of facilities, and no top-flight income to return to.

The ownership question has been answered

The funding question has not, though rather more of it is already answered than the ownership story suggests. Křetínský is set to become West Ham's largest shareholder without a pound of that consideration reaching the club. What reaches the club comes from elsewhere: player trading, which delivers cash, accounting profits and probably regulatory capacity as well; fresh equity, which solves liquidity but converts into squad spending only £15m at a time; and secured and receivables-based lending, which West Ham had already expanded to £124m before a ball was kicked in the Championship.

Three disclosures are worth watching. The first is the structure of any new capital entering WH Holding — equity or debt, and on what terms, given that a shareholder who is also a lender occupies two positions at once. The second is the drawn balance on the Rights and Media Funding facility, which is where pressure will show before it shows anywhere else. The third is West Ham's squad cost ratio under rules now monitored in-season, which will be tested during a transfer window rather than debated after one.

The percentage beside Křetínský's name settles who owns the club. It says nothing about any of the above.