West Ham and Daniel Kretinsky

Yet another false story has been published with the last twenty-four hours again incorrectly claiming Daniel Kretinsky is considering selling his West Ham shares suggesting he is unhappy how the club is being run.

The latest tale this time is written by Keith Wyness at Football Insider but is riddled with inaccuracies.

 It is matter of public record that Daniel Kretinsky paid £125m for 20% of West Ham shares in a new rights issue in 2021, then paid another £43.75m for a further 7% from other existing directors totalling £168.75m and not the £200m cited in the misleading article.

That valued the club at the time at £625m but the club probably worth at least twice that now perhaps up to three times that in years to come.

As Kretinksy invested before the end of the London Stadium windfall clause, the club was forced to pay a £6.5m penalty to the London Stadium owners of which £3.9m was recently ordered to be refunded on a court appeal.

Everton’s former chief Keith Wyness, who was quoted in the article, has form as being the source of highly speculative stories with little substance many of them related to West Ham.

The suggestion that Kretinsky has “fallen out of love with West Ham” presupposes that Kretinsky was ever in love with West Ham in the first place.

In reality the Czech billionaire investor Kretinsky treats West Ham like all of the one hundred plus companies he invests in, he holds his West Ham shares at arm’s length letting his trusted lieutenants deal with day-to-day communications and meetings.  He rarely attends games as he is far too busy running his multi billionaire worldwide empire to worry what is going on at West Ham and the Royal Mail takeover remains a top priority for the West Ham shareholder with a net worth now estimated to have reached £13 billion.

Another factor and separation of role at West Ham is his majority investment in Sparta Prague where he remains president and that is where his love and emotion lays in football if the true is known.

The latest inaccurate story follows on from a tall tale from TBR Football Chief Correspondent Graeme Bailey last week whose exclusives are often highly speculative at best.

At the time of that story our senior club source poured cold water at that claim by calling it ‘nonsense’ 

Kretinsky is on record as citing his part ownership of West Ham as his commitment to the UK and his credibility for the takeover of Royal Mail.  For these reasons a sale or complete takeover of West Ham seems very unlikely in the short term.