Cardiff City lost £96.2m in five years and owed the owner's side £134.3m. Then Cardiff City issued £42.7m of new shares, and the filings do not name the buyer

Cardiff City Football Club (Holdings) Limited has filed five sets of group accounts covering the last parachute year and the four since, and read together the five say one thing plainly: the club loses money every year, the owner's side lends it the difference, and the debt to that side grows. The loss before tax was £11.2m in the year to May 2021, £26.6m in 2022, £11.4m in 2023, £12.0m in 2024 as restated, and £35.1m in 2025, the relegation season: £96.2m across five years, a sum Cover has added from the five filings. In those five years the group's turnover was £150.9m and it paid its players £112.9m, 75 pence of every pound earned across the period. That ratio is flattered by 2021, when £48.4m of the £55.2m turnover was parachute money; across the four years since, player wages ran at 89 pence in the pound. In two of the five years the players cost more than the whole club earned: 111 per cent of turnover in 2022, the first season without parachute money, and 113 per cent in 2025.

What the owner has put in

Note 19 of the 2025 accounts is the ledger of who pays. At 31 May 2025 the group owed £97.0m to its majority shareholder and parties connected to him: £89.3m to the majority shareholder, of which £47.4m carries 7 per cent interest and a right to convert into shares at 15.69 pence, and £41.8m carries no interest; a further £7.7m to parties connected to him. A separate £37.3m is owed to SCP Tormen Finance Inc, registered in Monaco, a company over which a director of the club has significant influence, at 6 to 12 per cent; it charged the club £4.5m of interest in the year. That is £134.3m in all, against £116.0m a year earlier. In the year the connected parties advanced £23.6m of new loans, and in the year before that £23.9m. The accounts name the ultimate controlling party as Tan Sri Dato' Seri Vincent Tan Chee Yioun and record a £3m loan from his son, U-Peng Tan, folded into the shareholder loans in 2025.

What the filings show since

The post balance sheet note in the 2025 accounts, signed in early 2026, records something the loan ledger has not carried before: after the year end the group received amounts totalling £19,150,000 that are 'non-interest bearing with no requirement to pay'. The note does not say who from. Then, on 28 May 2026, the company allotted 4,272,000,000 new A ordinary shares of one penny each, £42.72m at par, taking the issued capital from £137.7m to £180.5m. The return of allotments names no subscriber and states no consideration. Cover does not print that as money put in, because this company has twice done the same thing with debt: allotments of A ordinary shares at a penny in June 2022 and May 2023, both returned as issued for cash, are described in the accounts that followed as conversions of advances from the majority shareholder, £19.0m and £36.5m. Whether May's allotment was new money or another conversion is not on any filing, and the club has not been asked to say.

What the club has spent and sold

Selling players has earned the club £15.6m of accounting profit across the five years, £6.1m of it in 2025, and the 2025 accounts added £12.5m of new registrations in the relegation year. The other windfall was not a player: in 2024 the club booked £12.0m for selling a share of the proceeds of its litigation over the Emiliano Sala transfer, plus a £5.75m settlement of an earlier dispute, £18.4m of exceptional income, with a release of provision, that sat below a £27.7m operating loss and cut the loss before tax to £12.0m as restated. The case itself, a €120m claim against Nantes, was awaiting a court decision in March 2026 when the accounts were signed, and because a share was sold the club would not receive the full sum even if it won. Contingent transfer payments the club may yet owe stood at £9.5m at May 2025, up from £3.6m.

Why sit still

This section is Cover's reading of the filings, not the club's account: Cardiff City has given no reason for a deadline day on which the only announced business was outgoing, Eli King to Gillingham for an undisclosed fee, Tanatswa Nyakuhwa to Newport County on loan and Kion Etete to Newport County on loan the next day, with the last arrival Krystian Bielik on 26 August. Three candidates sit in the accounts. The loss position: £35.1m before tax in the year just filed, on a wage bill already above turnover. The tax position: £249m of losses carried forward and a £21.6m deferred tax asset the directors will not recognise 'due to the ongoing uncertainty over future taxable profits'. The debt position: £134.3m owed to the owner's side, at rates from nil to 12 per cent, some of it convertible. And the squad: promoted, unbeaten in the league until Wednesday, and with three draws from three before the QPR defeat, which a board can read as good enough. The club has said none of this. Cardiff City are 19th and have yet to win, as have Burnley and Preston, and go to Portsmouth on Saturday.

Two limits. The accounts stop at 31 May 2025 and name no player, so nothing here attaches to an individual, and the summer's filings are a share return and a note, not a set of accounts. Cover has not read the four earlier years' spending on registrations, so the five-year transfer spend is not printed. Every figure above is in the money panel on the Cardiff City hub, one row per filing, with the filing linked.

Correction, 3 September 2026: this piece said the owner's side put in £61.9m this summer and that Cardiff City were the only Championship club without a win. The filings name no subscriber for May's £42.7m share allotment, and Burnley and Preston have also yet to win.