The Hammers wage bill reached a total of £63.88m last season up from £56.5m in the previous season.
And the 12% increase is likely to bring West Ham over the initial Financial Fair Play wage cap of £52m set for last season.
The £63.88m figure includes National Insurance and pensions costs for all 609 Hammers employees but the majority of these are part time staff and the vast majority of the money is thought to go to the 100 players and backroom staff employed on the football side of the club.
Two seasons ago the club’s commercial revenue grew from £7.9m to £13.9m and retail sales grew from £4.8m to £6m giving West Ham another £7.2m to spend last season so that pushed our maximum wage cap up to £61.2m.
The set of financial accounts published at companies house this week show commercial revenue and retail sales grew very slightly last season meaning our Financial Fair Play for this season will be restricted to around £57m, the sale of Mo Diame is believed to have bumped that up to just over the £60m mark but we will need to be prudent with the wage bill to stay within the rules.
Sean/Hugh I would love to see a hypothetical comparison between West Ham costs as at Dec 2014 and say December 2017 following one whole year in the OS. Is that something you could put your talent to? I can only imagine that the Daves see the move as generating more cash in terms of all streams but then of course on the downside we will have the annual rent to pay out. Care to speculate?
Happy new year by the way. Great site, keep up the good work.
Not a bad idea for a future article, I will get what I can come up with. We get around £20m from ticket income and I would expect that to double to £40m However I expect Commercial activities to soar from £14m to around £25m and retail to increase too. The rental of the OS is cheaper than the running costs of the Boleyn Ground
Nice one Sean, really look forward to that, you have whet my appetite already!
G