Newport County owed one of its directors £1,175,000, up from £280,000, and had £27,262 in the bank

Newport County, the football club that plays at Rodney Parade in south Wales, ran the 2024-25 season on a loan from one of its directors. The accounts Newport Association Football Club Limited filed at Companies House, the public register where UK companies must lodge company figures, on 30 March 2026 show £1,175,000 owed to company directors at 30 June 2025, against £280,000 a year earlier. Over the same year the club came to owe £2,196,838 more than it owned, a gap £915,007 wider than the year before and 71 per cent bigger on Cover's arithmetic. The £895,000 rise in the loan funded almost the whole of it. Cash at the year end was £27,262.

Unsecured, interest free, repayable on demand

Note 11 gives the terms: the loan is from the company director, and it is "unsecured, interest free and repayable on demand". Unsecured means no asset of the club stands behind it. Repayable on demand means the director can ask for the whole £1,175,000 back at any moment, against a bank balance of £27,262. The accounts do not name which of the three sitting directors it is; the chairman's report says a director's loan of over £1M allowed the club to keep operating. The accounts do not treat that support as optional: the going concern policy, the note on whether a company can keep trading for another year, says the company "has reported a loss for the year" and is "reliant upon the ongoing support of the director and have not received any indication that such support will not continue". No new money came in as shares beside the loan: called up share capital moved £230 in the year, to £2,688,700. Money put in as shares cannot be asked back; a loan repayable on demand can. The gap was filled by borrowing, not shares.

Who owns Newport County

Huw Jenkins OBE bought 52 per cent from the Supporters' Trust in January 2024, for an initial fee of £500,000, the previous directors' report says. The Trust kept 27 per cent, two board places and, in that report's words, an active role in the club. The year to 30 June 2025 is the first entirely after that change; Jenkins signed the accounts on 27 March 2026.

The loss the accounts do not print

Newport County is the only one of the four Welsh EFL clubs that files no profit and loss account. Cardiff City, Swansea City and Wrexham all publish turnover and staff costs; Newport files a balance sheet, a directors' report and notes, and no year's filing carries a turnover figure. The loss does not have to reach the public through the chairman, though, because the balance sheet gives it. Accumulated losses rose from £3,970,301 to £4,885,538, and with called up share capital up only £230 and no other reserve of any kind, that £915,237 movement is the year's result, on Cover's arithmetic. The chairman's report gives "an operating loss of around £760,000; this figure includes an historical bad debt write off". The two are different measures and the accounts do not bridge the gap. The wage bill does reach the public only through the chairman's narrative: "£400,000 less income than the previous season", total salaries including the academy "above £2.5M", and £120,000 spent on loan players. Those are round figures from an unaudited narrative, not the audited staff costs the other three clubs file.

The ledger

Creditors due within a year, the money the club must pay out inside twelve months, rose to £2,529,614 from £1,628,254, and other creditors, where the director's loan sits, went from £282,032 to £1,181,468. Take the loan out of both years and that line barely moves, £2,032 to £6,468: the whole increase is the loan, and it is 99.8 per cent of the £901,360 rise in everything the club owes within a year. Against the £2,529,614, £27,262 of cash is about 1p in the pound; debtors of £255,001 and £50,513 of fixed assets take everything the club owns to £332,776, or 13p in the pound. Not all of the £2,529,614 is a cash demand: £648,282 is accrued liabilities and deferred income, which at a football club is largely money already taken for season tickets and sponsorship, settled by playing the games rather than by writing a cheque. The accounts do not split the two. Bank loans rose to £85,506, and all of that now falls due within twelve months, secured over the company's assets under note 10, meaning the lender could take those assets if the loans went unpaid. The tax and social security balance, money owed to HMRC, fell by a third to £140,176 from £212,536, the one large line that moved the club's way. Average employees went 109, then 96, then 111, back to the 2022-23 level, and accumulated losses, every loss since the company began added together, reached £4,885,538.

Net liabilities were £1,306,891 at 30 June 2023 and £1,281,831 in 2024 before reaching £2,196,838, and cash went £60,476, then £45,707, then £27,262. The deficit was flat for two years, then widened in one. Swansea City, filing to the same date, lost £20,942,334 before tax and still shows net assets of £23,510,375: the Swansea City shareholders turned £21,029,217 of what the club owed those shareholders into shares inside the year, £86,883 more than the loss. The difference is not size but how the gap is filled, shares at one club and a demand loan at the other. Three things these accounts cannot tell you. The figures stop at 30 June 2025, so the season that has just finished will not be public until the next filing, due by 31 March 2027. The accounts are drawn up to 30 June, the emptiest point in a club's year, when last season's money has been spent and next season's has not arrived. And the whole filing is unaudited: the directors claim the small company exemption under section 477 of the Companies Act 2006, so no auditor has signed off a line of it.

Correction, 9 September 2026: an earlier version said the loss reaches the public only through the chairman's narrative. The filed balance sheet gives it, and the loss for the year to 30 June 2025 was £915,237.