It’s just a few months since West Ham United won their first trophy in more than 40 years with a last-minute 2-1 victory over Fiorentina to win the Europa Conference League final in Prague.
The host city was fitting. Czech tycoon Daniel Křetínský has
owned around 27 per cent of West Ham since buying the stake for around £160mn
in November 2021. Sweeter still, the match was played at the Fortuna Stadium,
home to Slavia Prague. Křetínský is co-owner of arch-rivals Athletic Club
Sparta Praha, internationally known as Sparta Prague, his boyhood club.
Křetínský was once a little-known lawyer. Now, he’s one of
Europe’s most prolific dealmakers, with a string of investments in companies
including UK supermarket Sainsbury’s, Royal Mail and French newspaper Le Monde.
But like any billionaire worth Scoreboard’s time, he’s a man
who loves his football. West Ham, he tells the Financial Times, always struck a chord with him, thanks to the
club’s distinctive claret and blue home shirts. It also helps that West Ham has
a long affinity with his home country.
Luděk Mikloško became the first Czech to play in England
when he joined the Hammers in 1990. These days, Tomáš Souček and Vladimír
Coufal are in the squad.
Křetínský bought into a club that swung to a net profit of
more than £12mn in 2021/22 from a net loss of almost £27mn the prior year. Revenue increased by £60mn to more than
£252mn, driven by bigger match day, commercial and retail takings. That’s well
behind the £613mn generated by Manchester City, the top team in terms of
revenue, but comfortably in the top half of the English league.
It had been widely expected that Křetínský would look to
take a majority stake in West Ham following the death earlier this year of longtime
co-owner David Gold.
However, Křetínský told the Pink Un’s Arash Massoudi that
“assets with very strong emotional values” require a special type of due
diligence. “You really need to think twice or three or four times whether the
overall equation gives you the right to nominate yourself into the position of
the majority owner just by money,” Křetínský says.
“In some situations for instance media or sport, you don’t
necessarily need to go always for a majority position,” he added. “Sometimes
you can do that but you need to take the right people on board with you because
I’m not English, I wasn’t born here,” he says.
Despite that longstanding “emotional engagement” with West
Ham, Křetínský confessed that Sparta Prague was his first love. “If you invest
in a club which hasn’t been your club since you were born you always feel, or I
feel, a bit guilty,” he says. “So for me, the minority position or potentially
maybe stronger minority position feels kind of a little bit more appropriate.”
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