West Ham will not bank £1billion
A badly researched article by Colin Mafham on the Daily Express claims that West Ham are set to earn one billion pounds from their move to the Olympic stadium suggesting they would have one billion in the kitty to play with by 2021!
Wishful thinking on the part of the Express and plainly wrong I am afraid! The first clue to the credibility of the article comes when the story claims West Ham have agreed to pay the LLDC £15m per year in rent for the stadium. In reality, West Ham will pay £15m upfront towards the conversion costs and around £2.5m in rent per year for the former Olympic Stadium.
The next falsehood is the claim that West Ham will earn an extra £54m every year in match day sales with the Olympic Stadium sold out. Currently, the club receive around £20m per season from match day receipts at the Boleyn ground for a capacity of 35,000. Although we have increased the capacity to 60,000 at the new stadium the club has heavily discounted season tickets meaning most ticket holders are paying less than this season. Over 8,000 of the expected 50,000 season tickets at the Olympic Stadium are under 16’s paying just £99 each raising less than £800,000 in annual revenue and another 8,000 seats have been sold at £289 per season raising another £2.3m per year.
The truth is our match day receipts will grow by a more modest £10m-£15m per season next season and not the £34m jump the Express suggests in their article.
The Express also points to the £100m minimum per club per season from the new TV deal but that is a level playing field for all Premier League clubs as everyone will get this and it has got nothing whatsoever to do with our move to the Olympic Stadium so I fail to see the relevance.
West Ham posted a turnover just over £120m in 2015 which included £76m from TV rights income and that is set to slightly increase in 2016 after a good FA cup run and sell out crowds & events for the last season at the Boleyn Ground.
When we look forward at the first season at the Olympic Stadium ending in May 2017 I personally estimate an increase of TV money at around £35m per season and extra match receipts of around £15m plus another £5m in additional retail sales and sponsorship deals. A turnover of £175m seems very possible but many of our fellow premier league competitors will see significant jumps in turnover also next season.
Even if we earn £175m in turnover over the next five years totaling £875m, Colin at the Express is completely missing the point that this is not money in the bank available to spend or share with the owners as most of it goes straight out the door again. The majority of our turnover and most other Premier League clubs for that matter gets spent on players wages and the increase in TV money is likely to bring massive hikes in the top players wages accordingly. Sad but true.
Sorry Colin, Nice try, No cigar!
sean i have a question. how are west ham going to compete with the so called big clubs in the premiership when the big clubs regularly spend £40 -50 or 60 million pounds on one player..which is far from what we can ever dream of doing ????? or is it ????with the value of west ham set to rise to 400 million plus when we move to the os..surely our wonderful owners , that only paid around the 100 million when they bought the club must be able to give our manager a bigger transfer fund then the 35 million pounds that has been quoted in the press..for years i have listened to how they saved the club from bankruptcy which is totally false because west ham united plc was always going to be a sound investment because of the local support for the club and the ringing of the turnstiles at every home game..i even hate the fact that everyone slags of the Icelanders because they tried to take our club to another level but failed because of the financial banking crisis in there country at the time. gold and sullivan have done a great job managing whufc but have also lined their pockets with a tidy profit at the same time, and i think its time for them to now put a bit back and really try to win the league for us next year..100 million transfer fund for mr bilic please
I think we have got some absolute bargains from the transfer market in the last two seasons. As long as we continue doing that , I don’t think we have to spend stupid money on players.
The so-called big clubs know only how to spend money. They don’t put in the work that we need to, and they don’t have such a fantastic recruitment team as us.
Hopefully it takes along time before they sus it, so we have time to catch up lol.
ps ask Man Utd what they got for their big money recently.
I can’t believe you are saying that about the two daivds. They are about 170 million down at the moment!
The short answer is we will never be able to compete financially with the likes of Manchester City, Manchester United, Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool. Financial fair play put pay to that by keeping the status quo. Yes clubs can spend £100m on a transfer budget but invariably you need mega wages to much the mega budget and we are up the limit on FFP so throwing money at the transfer budget doesnt work.
This year Leicester and ourselves have proved it is not all about the money anyway. Over many years your financial turnover was a great indication where you would finish in the league. All of that changed this season but is a one off , an anomaly? or can it be repeated.
Truth is we are still in debt, most of the £100m has been transferred from bank debt to shareholder loans owed to the two Daves but we still owe over £35m.
There is no easy answer but the OS allows us to move up a level and slowly build over the next ten years.
There’s always a load of confusion around football finances – I even managed to write my MBA dissertation on the subject. The figures given in the media are put there just to grab headlines. Player costs are usually inflated with regards to purchase price, but vastly understated on wages, which are expressed in £000’s per week. Apparently the public can relate to £50,000 a week, but can’t understand £2.5m per year. So if we buy a £10m player on a four year contract at £50k per week, then add on agent’s fees and ancillary payments around old contracts and that’s a commitment to expenditure of probably close to £25m.
As for the Chairmen, I agree that West Ham would probably have survived in some form no matter who had taken over. But there were very few buyers who would have made the instant injection G&S did and then pumped in more to keep it going. The biggest advantage is that they’re genuine fans with a football background, not an American franchise firm who don’t understand the English football industry, expect to take a dividend every year or extract the cost of the finance they borrowed to buy the club in the first place. Believe it or not, we were in dire straits when Eggie the biscuit man went down. £100m debt takes some servicing and regardless of how much we might like to think our beloved club is worth, there wasn’t a long queue of takers to stick in the immediate cash needed to save us and then the extra tens of millions over the next few years to stabilise us.
Sure, getting the OS has a cornerstone of the plan, but we had to still exist to achieve that aspiration. Without these particular Chairmen (and the efforts of Karren Brady, the only paid one among them) I seriously doubt we’d be in anything like the position we are. Div 1, maybe.
We are competing with the big boys right now and we are doing it with a core backbone of hardworking British players led by Mark noble and a mixture of players from various countries from lower leagues who have worked their way up to where they are now and so truly appreciate the value of success. I am reminded of the following quote by Theodora Roosevelt.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Have you been out on the beer all night?? Just where is this tidy profit coming from? The club was on it’s knees after the financial crash with the debt left behind by the icelandics. You dont think it was their own money that was being spent do you?? Loans against all the assets of the club & future TV, gate ££. There is another little stumbling block in the way of giving a £100m transfer fund, something called FFP… the big boys have massive sponsorship deals to help fund big deals along with CL TV £££.
The £1 billion will come from the Arab that becomes our new owner in the next couple of years,
When we become the London club with the best ground the best fans and financially the best bet for the future,
We will read the headlines We have brought in a new owner who has brought 51% of the club to take us to the next stage,
That person won’t care about fair play rules pay the fine like all the top clubs do and buy the best players at what ever price,
But that will kill our academy again,probably produce the wrong manager for our club,bring out the prawn sandwich mob to replace the true fans,
Personally I like our club as it is,yes it would be nice to win the odd trophy every 3 or 4 years,but I love this club for being the underdogs that like pure football and entertainment
Long live the Westham Way this is our club not some wealthy persons toy
Who wants to be a billionaire I don’t
we don’t need arabs or americans to be our new owners, only junior partners to in vest along with the two Davids and their descendants.
i do agree with some of what you are saying except i want us to win the champions league
Before anyone has a melt down over rich new owners, part of the OS deal is both D’s would have to hand over a large chunk of any profit to the taxpayer.
Good. That’s why they wont sell.
They can issue new shares to sell to new partners without selling there own.
thanks everyone for the coments like all hammers fans i just want us to be the biggest club in the country and trying to imagine how we can achieve that without having a Russian,,,american or arab owner pumping millions of pounds into the club like chelsea and man city. i do love the two davids but also feel that the clubs finances are never truly explained to the fans . i think this season is a one off because chelsea liverpool and man utd are in like a transition period with new managers and old players , next season will be the real test but in bilic we trust …coyi
Forget the rich owners in the near future,it isn’t going to happen for various reasons I’m still to sleepy to go into & have been mentioned by others.
Cheddars – fair play to you for stating an opinion and for appreciating the responses that came after it. That’s what forums are for, and all too often people take it upon themselves to chastise those who dare to stray beyond the party line. Not sure I agree entirely with your piece, but that’s fine – we’re all entitled to our opinion. Like you, I too wonder why we seem to be the only club blighted by the restrictions of FFP. I don’t quite understand it, and how we compare to others. If anyone can enlighten us with facts, that would be great, but like Bubs, I like our club like it is, growing slowly and retaining its soul and identity. COYI.
here here , and also fair play cheddars
Great manager / coach / tactician and players that graft their nuts off can achieve anything,
Leave it as it is , its moving in the right direction fast ! Two or three new additions and we are gonna be a bigger problem than we are now !
The sky is the limit ! Enjoy ! We don’t need any Arabs or yanks , our owners are Brits and hammers are their team ! Chelsea ,city , mancs , will never be British again !! Sad really !
Great that’s why I love this clubs fans,we are bigger then any foreign interest
Are you listening out there this is the Westham Way
Give Bobby his knighthood
Name something after Billy Bonds
And we can move on