Newport County owed its directors £1,175,000. A year earlier it was £280,000

Newport County spent last season running on a director's loan. The accounts Newport Association Football Club Limited filed at Companies House on 30 March 2026 show £1,175,000 owed to company directors at 30 June 2025, against £280,000 a year earlier. In the same year the club came to owe more than it owned by £2.2m, 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 is almost the whole of that. 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". The accounts do not name which of the three sitting directors that 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 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 equity went in beside it: called up share capital moved £230 in the year, to £2,688,700, with no share premium reserve. 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 is the chairman's own round number

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 and the wage bill reach the public only through the chairman's narrative: "an operating loss of around £760,000; this figure includes an historical bad debt write off", "£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 file.

The ledger

Creditors due within a year rose to £2,529,614 from £1,628,254, and other creditors, where the director's loan sits, quadrupled to £1,181,468. Against that, £27,262 of cash is about 1p in the pound. Not all of it 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, discharged by playing the matches rather than by paying cash. The accounts do not split the two. Bank loans rose to £85,506 from £20,753, which note 10 says are secured over the company's assets. The tax and social security balance fell by a third, to £140,176 from £212,536. Average employees rose from 96 to 111 as the cash fell, and accumulated losses reached £4.9m.

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, £45,707, £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, its shareholders having turned £21,029,217 into shares inside the year. The difference is not size but how the gap is filled: shares at one club, a demand loan at the other. Three limits. The accounts stop at 30 June 2025, so this season sits in the next filing, due 31 March 2027. 30 June is the quietest point of a club's year, struck after one season's income has gone and before the next arrives. And the only loss figure there is the chairman's round number.