3 July 2026

West Ham United Football Club Limited (00066516) · WH Holding Limited (05993863)

Working assumption: any new Křetínský funding is debt, not new equity

This article is an analysis of West Ham United’s secured funding position as at 3 July 2026. It (i) draws down the full Companies House charge register for West Ham United Football Club Limited (company 00066516, ‘the Club’) and WH Holding Limited (company 05993863, ‘WHH’, the parent), (ii) details all disclosed credit facilities and the transfer receivable/payable position from the audited FY25 accounts (year ended 31 May 2025, filed 27 February 2026), and (iii) assesses what security could realistically be offered to Daniel Křetínský, through 1890s Holdings a.s. or another EP-group vehicle, were he to fund the Club’s immediate cash flow and capital injection requirements by way of debt rather than new equity.

Sources: the live Companies House charge registers for both entities (retrieved 3 July 2026); the signed WH Holding Limited FY25 Annual Report & Financial Statements; Premier League and EFL rulebooks as they bear on security over club assets; and financial press reporting (FT, Reuters, The Times, Sky Sports) on the June 2026 ownership restructuring. Where a figure could not be verified to a primary source it is flagged rather than estimated. The FY25 balance sheet is thirteen months stale against a season that ended in relegation; every balance-sheet figure quoted must be read with that in mind.

Summary

• The Club-level balance sheet is fully encumbered; the holding company is clean. West Ham United Football Club Limited carries 3 outstanding charges: two Barclays charges created 16 July 2025 (a fixed charge and a charge over present and future estates/interests, in substance a fixed and floating package securing the £40.0m overdraft) and one Rights and Media Funding (RMF) charge created 30 July 2025 over freehold land and buildings, sitting alongside the all-asset debenture disclosed in the accounts as securing the £124.0m term loan. WH Holding Limited has no outstanding charges at all, the single most important structural fact for any new lender.
• The senior debt stack is £164m of commitments against a Championship revenue base. RMF’s five-year £124.0m facility (28 July 2025; £89.0m drawn at signing) plus the £40.0m Barclays overdraft (£16.3m drawn at the FY25 balance-sheet date) sit under an intercreditor agreement. RMF lends against Premier League broadcast flows; relegation converts a c.£97m central distribution baseline into roughly £49m of parachute income plus an EFL share, and the facility must be presumed to contain relegation-linked prepayment or borrowing-base mechanics whose terms are not public.
• FY25 discloses a club already stressed before the relegation shock. 
• Group pre-tax loss of £104.2m; turnover down £42.1m to £227.6m; 
• shareholders’ funds a £4.3m deficit; 
• £204.3m of creditors due within twelve months; 
• £22.0m of interest paid including £15.2m of implied interest on extended transfer payment terms; 
• gross player-related payables of £195.8m (£110.9m due within one year); 
• and a going-concern note that already forecast a summer 2026 liquidity shortfall requiring player sales or shareholder funding, before relegation was known.
• What can actually be pledged to Křetínský is narrow but real. Player registrations cannot be charged under league rules; central distributions can only be charged within league-consent gateways; the London Stadium is a leasehold concession, not a mortgageable freehold; and RMF plus Barclays already hold fixed and floating security over the Club’s assets, including the Rush Green and Chadwell Heath properties. The realistic security menu is therefore: (i) second-ranking Club-level security by intercreditor accession, (ii) first-ranking security at the unencumbered WHH level, share pledges over the Club and holdco receivables, accepting structural subordination, (iii) assignment of specific unencumbered transfer receivables, and (iv) contractual protections (guarantees, covenants, board rights) substituting for asset cover.
• The strategic reality: any Křetínský loan is a bridge to control economics, and should be priced and structured as such. At c.43% and rising, with the Sullivan block in play and league fair-market-value rules governing associated-party lending, the rational structure is senior-subordinated debt on arm’s-length terms with equity linkage (conversion or set-off rights against a future rights issue) rather than a maximal security grab that would collide with RMF’s intercreditor, league consent requirements, and the optics of a shareholder foreclosing on his own club.

Secured Lenders to West Ham United

Outstanding charges: West Ham United Football Club Limited (00066516)

The Companies House register shows 49 charges created since 1909-era filings, of which 46 are satisfied and 3 outstanding. The outstanding security, all created in a five-week window in summer 2025, is:

The satisfied register is a sixteen-year history of the Club’s funding relationships, and it matters for the Křetínský assessment because it demonstrates both the Club’s pattern of specialist secured borrowing and the precedent for security being layered and released as lenders rotate:

WH Holding Limited (05993863) 

WHH’s register shows only 3 charges, all satisfied: MSD UK Holdings (created 16 March 2021, satisfied 14 August 2023) and two CB Holding ehf. charges from 2013 (satisfied 2016). As at 3 July 2026 the holding company, owner of the Club, West Ham United Women FC Limited, and the £176.3m intercompany receivable from the Club, has zero outstanding charges. Its persons-with-significant-control register shows two active PSCs, with Křetínský notified from 10 November 2021. This unencumbered parent is the natural first-ranking security location for any new shareholder lender, and Part III builds on it.

Credit Facilities, Transfer Receivables and Payables

The facilities

The FY25 balance sheet,  what the lenders are lending against

Transfer payables and receivables

Player-related creditors, instalments owed to other clubs on past purchases,  total £195.8m gross at 31 May 2025, of which £110.9m falls due within one year and £84.9m beyond. This is the decisive number in the cash flow analysis: the Club entered 2025/26 with nearly £200m of committed outflows to other clubs and continued buying (Kilman-profile deals on long instalment schedules being characteristic), against a wage bill and interest burden that FY25 income did not cover. Relegation does not reduce a single one of these instalments.

On the receivables side, the accounts confirm the acceleration programme (£12.0m received net in FY25) but the gross transfer-receivable balance and its maturity profile require extraction from the debtor notes of the filed accounts, this paper deliberately does not assert a figure it has not verified. Directionally: the Declan Rice £105m instalment stream (2023) has been substantially collected or accelerated; the largest recent receivable generator is the Mohammed Kudus sale to Tottenham in July 2025 (a FY26 event, reported at approximately £55m), with 2025/26 departures — including Lucas Paquetá’s January 2026 exit to Brazil, adding further instalment streams whose profiles are undisclosed. The critical analytical point stands regardless of the precise balance: unencumbered transfer receivables are one of the few first-ranking security candidates left, and the Club has been consuming them for liquidity by acceleration, meaning the pool available to pledge to a new lender is smaller than the headline sales suggest.

Security available to Daniel Křetínský as debt funder

The changed context: lender and prospective controller are now the same person

When this question was first live, Křetínský at 27% behind Sullivan’s 38.8% and the Gold estate’s 25.1%, with J. Albert Smith at 8%, a Křetínský facility was minority-shareholder rescue lending. As at 3 July 2026 the position is transformed: Sullivan has resigned as co-chairman following the Panorama/Times allegations (which he denies); 

Křetínský has agreed with Vanessa Gold to acquire Gold-estate shares lifting 1890s Holdings to approximately 43%, becoming the largest shareholder, with completion reported as weeks away; and his November 2021 investment agreement is reported to include an option over the Sullivan and Gold shareholdings at a set price. Any debt he now advances is, in economic substance, the incoming controller funding his own asset, which changes what security is worth to him, and what taking aggressive security would cost him in league, regulatory and supporter terms. The Independent Football Regulator’s owner and officer regime now also sits over any change-of-control sequence.

What cannot be taken as security

• Player registrations. The squad, £223.2m NBV, the dominant asset, is not chargeable collateral. Premier League and EFL rules alike prohibit clubs from granting security over players’ registrations; a registration is a creature of league rules, not a freely assignable property right, and no charge over it is enforceable in any conventional sense. Lenders reach player value only indirectly, through assignment of the receivables generated when a registration is transferred.
• Central distributions, only through the league gateway. Both the Premier League and (now operatively for 2026/27) the EFL restrict assignments or charges over central funds: security over a club’s share of broadcast/central distributions requires league consent under the respective rules, and the leagues police the priority of such assignments, not least to protect the football-creditor waterfall. RMF’s model operates within precisely this gateway; a second assignment behind RMF over parachute and EFL distributions is possible in principle but requires both EFL consent and RMF intercreditor accommodation, and the parachute stream is already the senior lender’s core collateral.
• The stadium. A leasehold concession with no mortgageable freehold. Not available.
• Already-encumbered Club assets. RMF’s all-asset debenture (with charge 0049 over the training-ground/academy freeholds) and Barclays’ fixed and floating package pre-empt first-ranking Club-level security across the board. Their intercreditor agreement will contain negative-pledge and permitted-security regimes; a new secured lender at Club level enters only by consent and accession.

The realistic security menu

Fair market value and the associated-party dimension

Křetínský at c.43% is unambiguously an associated party. Three regimes bear on the terms of any loan: (i) the Premier League’s APT rules, following the 2024 arbitration which found the exclusion of shareholder loans from fair-market-value assessment unlawful, the amended rules require shareholder financing to be benchmarked; while West Ham is outside the PL for 2026/27, promotion is the entire business case, and structuring that fails PL FMV testing now would need unwinding later; (ii) EFL Profitability & Sustainability rules, under which a parachute club has wider loss headroom and equity-funded losses are treated more generously than debt-funded ones,  a substantive argument for the convertible route; (iii) the Football Governance Act regime, the IFR’s financial-regulation and owner-suitability powers make demonstrably arm’s-length, sustainability-enhancing funding the safe harbour. The practical consequence: interest at a defensible market rate (benchmarked against RMF’s own pricing as the observable market cost of Club risk), independent-director approval, and contemporaneous FMV documentation are not compliance decoration, they are what makes the facility usable across all three regimes.

Precedents

Křetínský’s leverage is close to absolute: the going-concern note names shareholder funding as the mitigation; the Barclays overdraft is at renewal this month into a relegation credit; RMF’s undrawn £35m is the only committed headroom and sits behind a borrowing base that relegation has impaired; the Gold estate is a seller; and Sullivan’s exit has removed the counterweight. The Club’s alternative to Křetínský money is forced player sales into a market that knows it is a forced seller.

The recommended structure, from a finance director’s chair assessing the counterparty’s likely ask: a two-tranche facility. Tranche 1 (c.£30–40m, immediate): bridge liquidity secured by structure C receivable assignments plus structure B holdco security (share pledge and intercompany-receivable assignment), PIK interest at an FMV-benchmarked rate, funding the summer wage and instalment wall. Tranche 2 (c.£60–90m, on completion of the ownership reorganisation): committed facility with conversion/set-off rights into a WHH rights issue (structure E), capitalising the bridge and rebuilding equity for the promotion push. Second-ranking Club security (structure A) is worth requesting for its intercreditor seat and third-lender blocking value, but should not be allowed to delay funding: its economic value behind RMF’s standstill is modest, and the share pledge already delivers the control economics. The board should assume Křetínský’s advisers reach the same conclusion, and should therefore negotiate hardest on conversion pricing and pre-emption protection for other shareholders, that, not the security schedule, is where value will actually transfer.

Previous article on impact of relegation 4th May 2026

Caveats and Data Limitations

• The FY25 accounts (31 May 2025 year-end, filed 27 February 2026) predate relegation, the Sullivan resignation and the Křetínský/Gold transaction; every balance-sheet figure is thirteen months stale against those events. FY26 accounts are due by 28 February 2027.
• Charge descriptions on the Companies House register are truncated summaries; the full instruments for charges 0047–0049 (fixed/floating split, negative pledges, title numbers, intercreditor references) should be downloaded before any structuring decision. The RMF all-asset debenture disclosed in the accounts should be reconciled to the register, the property charge 0049 is visible, and the debenture’s registration particulars should be confirmed from the charge documents themselves.
• The RMF facility’s pricing, covenants, relegation mechanics, borrowing base and the intercreditor terms with Barclays are not public; characterisations of standstill and consent dynamics are based on standard market practice, expressly flagged as such.
• The gross transfer-receivable balance and instalment profiles (including Kudus and Paquetá terms) are not asserted because they were not verifiable to a primary source; extract from the FY25 debtor notes and update for FY26 activity.
• The overdraft renewal dates show a minor inconsistency within the accounts themselves (17 June 2025→15 July 2026 in the strategic report; 10 July 2025→9 July 2026 in the notes per press extraction); either way renewal falls due in July 2026 and status should be confirmed directly.
• The Křetínský/Gold share transaction (27%→c.43%) was reported by the FT, Reuters and others as agreed but completing ‘in coming weeks’ as at mid-June 2026; completion, final percentages, and the terms of any option over the Sullivan block should be confirmed before this paper’s Part III is relied upon. Shareholders’-agreement terms (pre-emption, matching rights) are private and inferred only where flagged.
• Allegations concerning David Sullivan reported by BBC Panorama and The Times are denied by him and are unproven; they are referenced solely for their governance and ownership-structure consequences.

Disclaimer: this is a research and analysis document prepared from public filings and reporting. It is not legal, tax or investment advice; facility and shareholders’-agreement terms characterised as market-standard are inferences and are flagged as such. Allegations referenced are unproven and denied where stated.