03 Oct 2026 16:56:35
When West Ham move into the London Stadium, the deal was heavily criticized as a give-away to the club. The Hammers took a 99 year lease, at a fixed rent of £4.6 mil a year in the PL. The freehold owners Greater London Authority are reckoned to be losing £19 mil a year on the deal. A real sweetheart deal for West Ham at the tax payer's expense.
I had a quick look at Citeh's lease deal. It is for 250 years from Manchester City Council at a rent of between £3.5 and £5 mil a year. An even better deal than West Ham's! Poor old tax payer!
03 Oct 2026 20:56:56
Deep I think the deal is even better for WHU now they have been relegated with the rent dropping to just over £1m
The cost of the build and conversion to a football stadium - not massively different I would imagine from building as a football stadium initially - was huge well over £700m.
The tax payer is thus effectively funding WHU to the tune of some £70m plus pa.
They benefit from a £700m + stadium with a capacity of over 60k which means they earn nearly £40m pa from match days cf the match day income of just over £20m Wolves make.
But if they had built it - they wouldn't because no one would have lent them the £700m to do so - they would be paying interest north of £70m on that debt.
They were paying over 10% + on their debt prior to the latest refinancing and with that amount of debt interest rates would actually have been far far higher!
With that amount of interest they would have been forced to sell off a significant number of their best players each year just to meet that bill and avoid breaching FFP.
Consequently they would almost certainly have been relegated, (and goodness what would have happened to them after that), almost immediately they took over the stadium.
Looking at it at it different way they get an extra £20m of revenue and all the other benefits of playing in front of 60k + for free.
A totally unfair advantage over the rest of the teams in the country that somehow they have managed to completely mess up!
Deep I know it is bash man City week but to be fair to them the cost of the initial build was modest - just north of £100m - and City paid for the conversion and expansion program of well over £300m themselves.
Thus the rental is probably only a few million less than a true reflection of the situation and de minimis in comparison with the insane deal WHU got.
Note to be fair to the government what else could they do with the stadium so WHU were negotiating with a party they knew had no other options!!
04 Oct 2026 13:36:16
TFIOG3,
WHU are the darlings of the Media and another one of the favoured London clubs as they won the world cup single handedly?
I don't think anyone should be fair to the Government either & not just this completely useless lot. These poor decisions are the reasons why councils go bust (B'ham as an example) Manchester 1.3Billion in debt. They keep raising council tax annually even though this lot said they wouldn't.
Gov'ts, local councils etc don't think too far ahead & certainly don't budget effectively as in quite simple terms it's not there money. I get quite upset at the corruption in Gov't & how councils operate. They just keep coming back for more! Most wouldn't last 5 minutes in the private sector where business operates to make a profit.
04 Oct 2026 14:17:47
Black - the people that I was partially defending were the post 2012 Government that had a white elephant - the Olympic stadium - to deal with and only WHU as possible tenants.
The people to blame were the Government in the early 2000s.
They not only built a stadium with zero thought as to what was going to happen after the games but astonishingly also did so in full knowledge that at almost exactly the same time, another £0.75bn stadium - the national football Stadium, New Wembley- was being built.
How and why they failed to see that a coordinated approach was the answer is hard to fathom. Perhaps if they had worked together a single truly magnificent Olympic/National Football stadium could have been built at a fraction of the price that would now be viable!
Instead we have 2 relatively modest stadiums one of which is a financial black hole!
04 Oct 2026 20:32:55
Interesting comments Future. Boris Johnson when London mayor arranged the sweetheart deal for West Ham at the tax payers's expense. Remember, the Hammers sold Upton Park for redevelopment and banked £38 million in 2016 and were then gifted a shiny new stadium to rent at a pittance. No doubt that saved them from relegation. Leyton Orient also wanted the London Stadium but were blocked. Spurs even had an interest. West Ham were definitely not the only bidders in town. Who wouldn't be interested, sell one, get one free, bank the cash?
By the same token, Citeh sold their former stadium, Maine Road. I don't know how much it sold for but I do remember they even auctioned off square feet of turf. Whatever the details, they were in effect gifted a new stadium at a cheap rent and could bank the Maine Road proceeds. I just read that the Citeh owners were also given first refusal on all the major Manchester property developments for many years. Another gift.
I would love it if we could sell Molineux for tens of millions and then rent a brand new state of the art stadium on the cheap. Now that would transform Wolves!
04 Oct 2026 21:19:09
Deep I certainly do recall WHU selling Upton Park and banking the cash.
I was advising a firm that was owed a very substantial sum of money by WHU and was one of a team that was charged with deciding how the firm should deal with the problem of how to get the money back!
The proposed and then eventual sale of Upton park was the answer to the problem.
I didn't know it was Boris not the Central Government who did the deal but again trying to be fair I am not sure if Orient were ever a serious tenant as they were a lower league side - possibly even non league at that time.
Spurs on the other hand could have been an option but their "home" is some 3 to 4 times further away from Stratford than WHU's "home" .
Consequently whilst I don't know, I strongly suspect, that Spurs'interest was minimal and sadly WHU almost certainly knew that they were the obvious and only real candidate for the stadium.
Consequently they were able to extract a truly awful deal from the Government from the Government's perspective.
However this was a deal that was made some 20 years prior when the Government failed to plan properly and went ahead and built a white elephant.
Again of course you are correct re City but I was only pointing out that the scale of the "awfulness" pales into almost insignificance compared to the truly amazing deal WHU got.
It is therefore also truly astonishing how WHU have managed to so completely mess it up!
Agreed a free £20m pa ad infinitum plus as you say the one off proceeds from the sale of your own ground would be pretty helpful for most clubs!
Not sure however in Wolves case that Fosun wouldn't have found some more imaginative use, both for the £20m pa and the proceeds of the sale of Molineux, than building a successful football club!