Björgólfur Guðmundsson (2 January 1941 – 2 February 2025) was an Icelandic businessman and chairman and owner of West Ham United.

[1] In December of the same year Forbes revalued his net worth to $0,[2] and on 31 July 2009 he was declared bankrupt by the Icelandic courts with debts of almost £500 million (96 billion ISK).

[3] Björgólfur was described in an article written by Jamie Jackson of The Guardian as "a former footballer, furniture packer and law student, a recovering alcoholic of 30 years and an old-fashioned philanthropist".

[5] He went to Russia, remade his fortune and returned to Iceland, where he also had interests in shipping, publishing, food, communications and property.

[6] Björgólfur was born in Reykjavík, Iceland, to Guðmundur Pétur Ólafsson (1911–79), a driver, and Kristín Davíðsdóttir, growing up on Framnesvegur.

[13] Accounts vary, but it has been claimed that in 1958 Björgólfur was asked by the family of Thor Philip Axel Jensen, Iceland's foremost businessman of the time, to accompany Hallgrímur Fr.

In Roger Boyes's account, Björgólfur was prosecuted for bookkeeping irregularities, receiving a twelve-month suspended jail sentence, but in Illugi Jökulsson's interpretation, this The affair had a considerable effect on Björgólfur and his son, and both at times portrayed their subsequent business activities as a way to take revenge on the people they saw as their persecutors and to regain their reputations.

[20] One of the avenues through which Björgólfur worked to restore his reputation in the years following the Hafskip affair was by starting a successful alcoholics' rehabilitation centre in Reykjavík.

[citation needed] In 1991, in the wake of the Hafskip affair, Björgólfur began running the brewery and soft drinks unit of Pharmaco, a pharmaceuticals group.

[citation needed] In 2005 an article in The Guardian noted that in the 1990s the three Icelandic businessmen "were not only ploughing money into the country but doing it in the city regarded as the Russian mafia capital.

[31] Björgólfur became famous and very popular in Iceland during this time as the country's leading philanthropist, both through the direct contributions of himself and his wife Þóra, and through contributions made by Landsbanki (where he started a special service with the tag "Give help to a good cause"): "dressed in his trademark pin-striped suits he came to be [...] loved by the public, and was for a while perhaps more influential in the island's cultural life than even the Minister of Culture, who in effect was downgraded to second fiddle in many opening ceremonies".

[33] Particularly since the 2008 economic crash, however, it has been pointed out that by accident or design this massive patronage of the artistic and intellectual life of Iceland tended to silence critical commentary on the banking boom, helping to cause the collapse.

[34] Björgólfur's use of sponsorship of the cultural sector to win public approval of himself and his businesses extended to buying influence in the media.