Cardiff City lost £96m in five years and owed the owner's side £134m. This summer the money arrived as a gift and as shares, and no player came with it

Cardiff City Football Club (Holdings) Limited has filed five sets of group accounts since the parachute payments ran out, 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 £111.5m, 74 pence of every pound earned across the period. The year the 113 per cent figure came from, players paid more than the whole club earned, was the second such year of the five: 2022, the first season without parachute money, was the other, at 111 per cent.

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 has come in 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'. Loans of £2.25m came in and £4.9m went out. 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 leaves the non-cash consideration box blank and does not say whether any loan was converted; at the 15.69 pence conversion price in the loan terms, £42.7m of loans would have become 272 million shares, not 4.27 billion, so the filings do not describe a conversion of those loans and Cover does not print one. What the filings do show is that between the balance sheet date and the end of May the owner's side put in £61.9m in forms that do not have to be repaid, more than in any single year of the five.

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 that turned a £28m operating loss into an £11.7m loss before tax. 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 and Tanatswa Nyakuhwa to Newport County on loan, and the last arrival was Bielik on 26 August. Four 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 7 to 12 per cent, some of it convertible, with the summer's £61.9m arriving as capital rather than as loans, which is what a lender does when it wants the balance sheet to look different rather than bigger. 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, the only Championship club without a win, 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. And the four earlier years' spending on registrations was not read this pass, 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.