James Ford is a columnist for City AM and was an adviser to former Mayor of London Boris Johnson on transport policy
Sadiq Khan isn’t being honest with the citizens of London. Now, I suspect that will not come as much of a surprise to dedicated readers. Across myriad policy areas, the Mayor of London is a past master when it comes to half-truths, wilful misrepresentations, political double-speak and outright porkies. But, as egregious as the Mayor’s fibs about his housing numbers, crime figures or fare evasion are, his latest statements on the London Stadium are real doozies.
As the Mayor tells it, the source of all of City Hall’s financial woes regarding the London Stadium is the much-criticised deal the former Mayor, Boris Johnson, did with West Ham in 2013 to persuade the club to relocate from Upton Park to the former Olympic Stadium in Stratford. Sadiq Khan has described that arrangement as “the worst deal imaginable”. According to Sadiq, the relegation of West Ham from the Premiership is going to cost City Hall around £2m because of how the London Stadium deal was structured.
As I have written before, the deal that Boris did with West Ham can best be described as flawed. Any deal that was predicated upon West Ham being consistently good at football was always going to be a hostage to fortune. West Ham have been relegated from the top flight of English football on no fewer than six occasions in the past century, including twice since the creation of the Premiership. Indeed, there are only six clubs that have never been relegated from the Premiership since it was established in 1992 (Arsenal, Chelsea, Everton, Liverpool, Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur, if you were wondering). And none of the four London clubs listed was ever interested in taking on the former Olympic Stadium.
A great deal was not on the table in 2013 or, indeed, at any time. To secure a meaningful, sporting future for the Olympic Stadium, it was very much a choice between a bad deal and no deal at all.
However, Boris’s deal with West Ham is not the biggest financial problem that the London Stadium has. According to Lyn Garner, the Chair of London Stadium LLP (the public body that manages and operates the former Olympic Stadium) in the 2025/26 financial year it made a loss of around £19m. Now, the financial year 2025/26 is the year before West Ham were relegated. The London Stadium was already operating in the red – and quite a long way in the red – regardless of West Ham’s misfortunes on the pitch. Worse still, according to Ms Garner, losses have “been in this ballpark for some time”.
London Stadium LLP is supposed to generate revenue by renting out the Stadium for concerts and other (non-football) sporting events. But, last year, it managed to do so for just two concerts. The company has also failed to sell the naming rights to the stadium no fewer than three times (including a £20m deal with Vodafone that collapsed in 2017). These are thought to be worth at least £4m a year, but more could be secured if naming other venues in the Olympic Park was included. West Ham has passed on this option, claiming the value of the rights is diminishing. This suggests that not only has London Stadium LLP lost around £40m in potential revenue since the Mayor came to office in 2016, but that delay has now devalued one of the Stadium’s biggest potential revenue sources.
The ownership of London Stadium LLP was transferred from the London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC), the body that manages the former Olympic Park, to City Hall (GLA Holdings Ltd) in January 2025 under a formal ‘mayoral decision’ (MD3324). At the time of the transfer, City Hall cited that the new structure would allow then new stadium’s leadership would be able to “focus entirely on commercial arrangements for the Stadium”. That, clearly, has not worked out as planned. However, it did allow the GLA to reduce its annual grant to LLDC by nearly £8m (to ‘just’ £11.3m). Either City Hall is robbing Peter to pay Paul, or else it was a mistake for the Mayor to take London Stadium LLP on to the GLA’s balance sheet more directly.
The Mayor of London should come clean about the London Stadium. On his watch, the public body that should be at least breaking even – and maybe even generating a profit – for Londoners is being systematically run into the ground. Rather than ranting about the deal Boris did, the Mayor should admit that he has taken his eye off the ball when it comes to one of the Greater London Authority’s biggest physical assets. If London Stadium LLP is underperforming currently then the Mayor needs to take responsibility for that. If the stadium has been recording losses of around £19m for multiple years, arguably the Mayor should have intervened sooner to stop the rot. City Hall should certainly be asking why the sale of the stadium’s naming rights has fallen through not once, not twice, but three times. Regardless of the deal that Boris did, the London Stadium could – and should – be making much, much more per year than it currently is. And that is Sadiq’s fault, not Boris’s.