'Perhaps' may not be enough to save Sheffield United's season
Paul Heckingbottom was been sacked by Sheffield United, but the questionss at Bramall Lane run far deeper than the manager.
It was least surprising managerial sacking that we’ll likely see in the Premier League this season, but it’s difficult to avoid the suspicion that getting rid of Paul Heckingbottom from Sheffield United is at best attacking a symptom rather than the cause, and that there may even be a case for saying that things may yet get even worse without him.
If anything, the most surprising thing about the club’s return to the Premier League was that they got anywhere near it in the first place, against such a backdrop of turmoil. Because Sheffield United have been in a mess for quite a while now, one which transcends which division they’re playing in and which has happened despite them having the huge financial advantage of parachute payments.
The club had been placed under transfer embargo in January over the non-payment of instalments to other clubs, and in March the Daily Mail reported a litany of cost-cutting measures being taken in an attempt to keep the club from missing end of month wage payments and potentially even ending up in administration. It was suggested that they would have ended up there at the end of last season regardless, had they not got promoted back to the promised land on account of their previous Premier League parachute payments, which were coming to an end.
The club was up for sale by owner Prince Abdullah, who we can only assume to be the poorest man in Saudi Arabia, but there didn’t seem to be a great deal of interest, which was strange, considering that they’d been in the Championship’s top six since the middle of August. At the start of the year, there was interest from a Nigerian ‘entrepreneur’ by the name of Dozy Mmobuosi, who claimed to own an airline and an online marketplace business with 9m customers. But the pictures of the planes were just stock aircraft photos with his company’s logo (pretty badly) photoshopped on the side, while research by The Athletic found that his marketplace app had been downloaded less than 100 times from the Google Play Store. Whatever happened to him? Ah.
With the departures of Iliman Ndiaye and Sander Berge to Marseille and Burnley respectively, Billy Sharp being released (and then strangely surprisingly turning up at LA Galaxy), and with a further two key players, James McAtee and Tommy Doyle, returning to their Manchester City-funded home planets, even with new players arriving there was little to suggest that the squad that was to start 2023/24 wasn’t actually weaker, on paper at least, than the one which had finished the previous one. The new season started badly for the men’s team on the pitch, but things were about to get a lot worse for the club as a whole, and in a way which transcended mere football alone.
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Maddy Cusack was Sheffield United’s longest-serving player at the time of her death, on the 20th September. She’d made more than 100 appearances for the club over the previous five seasons after previously having been on the books at Nottingham Forest, Aston Villa Birmingham City and Leicester City. She also worked for Sheffield United as a marketing executive, and had signed a new contract for the club during the summer.
A month after her death, it was reported that Jonathan Morgan, the Sheffield United women’s team manager, was being investigated over concerns which had been raised concerning his alleged treatment of certain squad members. Whether this relates to Maddy in any way is not known, but in November her family issued a statement in which they stated that her spirit had been "broken" from February 2023 and over the months leading up to her death.
The club has agreed to an external inquiry into this matter. Maddy deserves for the full truth of her story to be laid bare. For what should be obvious reasons we do not yet know any further details about this, and it would be both irresponsible and disrespectful to speculate. But it should be equally obvious to say that it is to be fervently hoped that Maddy’s family can get some sort of closure from this terrible and tragic happening.
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Four days after Maddy’s death, the men’s team lost 8-0 at home to Newcastle United. To that point, the men’s team had lost every game they had lost by a single-goal margin, including their previous two to Manchester City and Spurs. The dismal run only got worse. By the time they’d played ten matches they still only had that single point, and when a win finally came in game eleven against Wolves, it took a penalty kick scored with practically the last kick of the game to get over the line. A 1-1 draw at Brighton in their next match hinted further that a corner may be about to be turned.
But two defeats have followed at home against Bournemouth and away to Burnley, and they’ve rather disavowed most onlookers of that notion. Against Bournemouth, another team who’ve not been tearing up trees this season, they looked clearly second best. Against Burnley, who were promoted alongside them at the end of last season, they looked like a Championship team—perhaps even a League One team—playing a Premier League team. And Burnley haven’t been tearing up any trees themselves, either.
These results were enough to cost Heckingbottom his job, and it’s not difficult to see why. Much had been made of that gap between the between that bottom four clubs of Bournemouth, Luton, Burnley and Sheffield United—latterly gate-crashed by Everton—and this was losing badly to two of the others. Prior to their meeting at Turf Moor, Burnley had lost each of their first seven home League matches of the season. They beat Sheffield United 5-0. They may be five points from safety, but they’re eight points from fifth from bottom and it doesn’t seem likely that Everton will be hanging around the relegation places for that long. They’re starting to look lost already.
So, how does this change? There are rumours now circulating that Mike Ashley could be interested in nuying the club. What that might look like, considering the club’s recent performance both on the pitch and in the accounting ledger, is just about anybody’s guess, but the reviews from Newcastle could hardly have been worse. And with less than a month to go until kick-off in the annual mug’s eyeful that is the January transfer window, who could be persuaded to take on this Mission: Impossible?
For Heckingbottom’s replacement, they’ve gone back to the future, and Chris Wilder. The last time Wilder was seen at Bramall Lane, Sheffield United had 14 points from 28 games in the Premier League. What this says about expectations for the rest of this season probably doesn’t bear thinking about. Wilder would have to double that tally to have a decent chance of keeping them up. Oh, and he has four fewer games.
When you look at the team’s position and some of the decision-making there over the last few months, it’s difficult to avoid the suspicion that somebody, somewhere is already writing this season off. Either that or this is legitimately the limit of what they can spend at the moment. Chris Wilder and a bunch of guys whose names vaguely ring a bell, but you can’t quite place from where?
And it is worth bearing in mind that any takeover could be jeopardised by the outcome of investigations currently ongoing. The value of the club could surely only be damaged by any accompanying negative publicity, and the possibility of it being extremely negative has to be considered on the spectrum of possible outcomes. Were that to be the case then que sera sera, so far as the club’s concerned. But none of this seems likely to make any takeover more straightforward.
Perhaps Chris Wilder will come good. Perhaps Mike Ashley will take over and not do quite a lot of the things that he did at Newcastle before. Perhaps a new group of players brought in at the start of next year can pull off some sort of great escape. Perhaps every roll of the dice will be a double six from now on, this time. And perhaps there will be an answer to the question of why a footballer and club employee found the burden too heavy to carry on any more which doesn't shame the club and the game. There's certainly no ‘perhaps’ about the fact that getting this question answered and getting answers for her family is more important than anything that could happen on the pitch, this season.