Supporters attack Brady bonus of £238,000 ‘for failure’
Thanks to the London Stadium deal, the owners are sitting pretty despite large debts and a relegation battle
Karren Brady, the West Ham United vice-chairman, has come under fire for her £238,000 bonus revealed in the club’s latest accounts.
The accounts, which reported a £28.2 million loss, showed that Brady was the highest-paid director and that her remuneration rose from £898,000 to £1.136million.
West Ham have not commented on Brady’s pay, but it is understood the increase represents a performance-related bonus which they believe can be justified by progress off the pitch.
Protest group West Ham United
For Change said in a statement: “We are very disappointed to see Karren Brady was awarded a huge pay rise for her continued failed attempts at the rebranding of the club which have been a significant contributory factor to the current dissatisfaction of the supporters.
“A club of our stature cannot have a vice-chairman that spends more time working on her brand than she does for the club.”
The group also questioned why co-owners David Sullivan and David Gold had not increased their equity in the club, while charging interest on their loans that total £45 million.
Sullivan and Gold received an interest payment of £1.9million in August 2019 and West Ham United For Change added: “Whilst we have a concern that they charge 4 per cent interest, unlike many other owners that provide interestfree loans, a greater concern is that they have actually failed to increase their equity stake in the club. They should be converting some of their £45million in loans to shares and providing a real equity injection to put the club on a more secure footing.
“We appreciate that whilst there has been investment in the playing staff, that is no good without a significant investment in the structure and support for the team in training facilities, scouting and coaching.”
The accounts showed that £22 million over the past four years – £5.5 million a year – had been spent on infrastructure.
Good news for the owners of West Ham United, whose eye-catching losses and record levels of supporter discontent were offset this week by a top-of-the-table finish that may come as a surprise to those still making the trek out from Stratford via Westfield shopping centre.
The club were voted best for “match-day stadium experience” according to a survey conducted by that well-known expert in football culture, the budget hotel chain Premier Inn, who considered “cost”, “team quality” and “food and drink quality” well ahead of “stadium history”. For those clubs unhappy with the results, one can only advise devising their own league table ranking the nation’s Premier Inns along similar lines.
One also notes reports during the summer of 2018 that West Ham’s players spent some of pre-season recuperating from training sessions at the Romford branch of the same hotel chain, which poses another question. Might they have amassed more Premier Inn loyalty points than those awarded for wins and draws in the Premier League?
So to those financial results released this week ahead of last night’s Premier League/inn clash with Liverpool, detailing the £28.2million losses they announced for the previous financial year to maintain the club’s proud status as relegationthreatened struggler. The Manuel Pellegrini experiment undertaken by owners David Sullivan and David Gold in the summer of 2018, as well as signings such as Felipe Anderson and Jack Wilshere, put £30million on a wage bill that now stands at £135.8million.
The club’s accounts record a loan of £42 million from Rights and Media Funding which was repaid in total in July and was replaced with a £39 million loan from the same source repayable in July this year. The additional £45 million loan from Gold and Sullivan, accumulating an interest rate of 4.25 per cent per annum, has attracted criticism from fans’ groups who would rather the owners put equity into the club instead of debt.
Other highlights included what the club describe as a £238,000 bonus for Karren Brady, the vice-chairman, principally for an increase in turnover to £190.7million that takes her latest annual earnings to £1.136million. As ever, the club’s owners invite their critics to look back at the £110million debt-saddled club they acquired in 2010 and be thankful for their intervention – although there is no question as to who the biggest beneficiaries have been.
That is Sullivan and Gold, from whom the standard response on West Ham’s future is that the club is not for sale. Yet the losses in these results once again bring the focus back on the 99-year lease agreement struck between West Ham and the London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC) for an annual Premier League season tenancy of £2.5million.
In March 2013, the two parties signed an agreement on a percentage due back to the taxpayer in the event of Sullivan and Gold selling the club over the following 10 years. Under that agreement a sale this year, for example, of more than £300million would yield 20 per cent of a consideration to the public purse. A sale of between £200million and £300million would yield 12.5 per cent. A sale after 2023 earns nothing for the taxpayer.
Under the agreement, the provision is that any debt would be covered in the sale price and the taxpayer percentage would come out of the remaining balance. In that respect there are few long-term disadvantages to Sullivan and Gold in the club taking on debt when it comes to West Ham’s sale now, or indeed after the elapse of the LLDC clawback agreement. It is also worth noting that under the terms, the club could be sold at any time before March 2023 to a member of the Sullivan or Gold families without any liability being owed to the taxpayer.
By 2016, when West Ham moved into the London Stadium, the cost to the public purse of converting it to football had risen to £323million, of which just £15million had been contributed by Sullivan and Gold in a one-off payment.
West Ham were portrayed in some quarters as having pulled off the greatest deal of all, persuading successive governments eager for an Olympics legacy to build them a stadium, which would propel them to become one of English football’s super-clubs.
Midway through their fourth season there, Sullivan was obliged this week to warn of the “serious financial consequences” of relegation for that putative super-club, still contriving to miss the golden opportunity once deemed impossible to squander. Yet for the owners of the club, Sullivan (51.1 per cent) and Gold (35.1 per cent), there is no downside. Most recently valued at £473 million by Forbes, the clock is ticking on what, if anything, there will be in any sale of West Ham for the taxpayer who built and all but converted the former Olympic Stadium.
As for the supporters, their independent groups have found it difficult to have their voice heard by Brady. She has established her own “Official Supporters’ Board”, which sounds like the ultimate solution to supporter disquiet: in-house, on-message dissent. In the latest annual report there was no mention of the long-term future from Sullivan, 70, or Gold, 83.
Should, for example, Sullivan decide that his share of West Ham passes to his son Jack, currently managing director of West Ham Women, then that would be exempt from any agreement to return money to the public purse.
Between the auditing and publication of their financial results, Pellegrini, the manager described by Sullivan as having “the most successful track record in the club’s history” and on whose advice £143.7 million was spent in the transfer market, had been sacked. The ambition has once again been downgraded to Premier League survival and the only upside of failure for the ownership can once again be found in that 2013 dream deal with LLDC. A season’s tenancy at the London Stadium playing in the Championship comes at the reduced price of £1.25 million.
The club’s ambition has once again been changed to Premier League survival