Sheffield Wednesday and Chansiri doing Chansiri things again

Perhaps Sheffield Wednesday supporters would be more sympathetic towards the club's inability to pay their wages on time at the end of March had the owner not messed them around so many times before.

The gap between success and obliteration sure can feel slight, at times. On the one hand, it’s still almost close enough to be able to taste. Sheffield Wednesday are, at the time of writing, in 12th place in the EFL Championship. They’re five points from the playoffs with seven games of the season left to play and only goal difference separating them from their highest league finish in eight years and—perhaps, perhaps, perhaps—even a return to the Premier League following an absence of a quarter of a century.

And while that all may sound unlikely, you don’t have to have a particularly long memory to be able to recall a time when the world seemed to be dancing to their tune. It’s only been three years since arguably the greatest playoff comeback of all-time, when they came back from 5-1 down after their semi-final first leg against Peterborough United to take the tie to a penalty shootout which they won, before beating South Yorkshire rivals Barnsley at Wembley to claim a place back in the Championship following two years away.

But it can feel a little at times as though any steps forward that Wednesday make will always come will always be followed by at least one step back. There always seems to be an asterisk. And this season’s arrived at the start of April with the news that the club had failed to pay the players’ wages at the end of March. This, reportedly, is due to a downturn in the business fortunes of the club’s owner Dejphon Chansiri, whose family controls the Thai Union Group, the world's largest producer of canned tuna.

This sort of news causes an immediate furrowing of the brow. If a professional football club can’t pay the staff who are actually keeping the club functioning—and this ranges from the players to the office staff—then they are failing at arguably their most basic obligation as a business. Every football club bankruptcy starts this way, and everybody knows this, which is why governing bodies stamp down so hard upon it.

The reason for this from a governance and sporting perspective should be fairly obvious; if everybody in the Championship is chasing one of those three places in the promised land, why should one of them be allowed to chase for it while not meeting the sort of obligations that everybody else is. Everybody knows that this division is hopelessly distorted by Premier League parachute payments, and Wednesday are one of the eighteen clubs in the Championship that don’t receive them, but that doesn’t give anybody carte blanche to disregard their most basic obligations towards their own staff.

You’ll need an electron microscope to be able to see the amount of shrift that Chansiri will get from Wednesday supporters over all this because, if nothing else, they have definitely been here before. In July 2019, the club had to sell their Hillsborough stadium to Chansiri for around £60m in ensure they did not breach spending rules, a loophole in financial regulation which has since been closed. In October 2023, the billionaire owner asked fans themselves to crowdfund £2m to cover an outstanding bill to HMRC; again, an amount of money that the club itself should have been paying. They were under embargo for a failure to pay HMRC earlier this season, too.

The biggest cause for concern for Wednesday supporters is that this sort of incompetence could have knock-on effects beyond torpedoing the team’s chances of sneaking into the playoffs this season. If there is a most popular person at Hillsborough it’s coach Danny Röhl, who arrived at the club in October 2023 with the team in a very bad way indeed following promotion from League One. Even by the end of November they were plum bottom of the table, with just one league win from 18 games and already twelve points from safety.

But Röhl turned that around. Sheffield Wednesday only spent four weeks of the season outside the Championship relegation places. The first of those was the first week of the season, but the other three were the last three and those, of course, are the ones that really count, with a run of four wins and two draws from their final six matches lifting them to 20th place and safety by three points. With just one win from their first six games, this season saw another difficult start, but Röhl has stabilised the team, getting them into the pack that is chasing the remaining available playoff places.

This is not an insignificant achievement, and it’s inevitable that it will have drawn the attention of other clubs. Southampton, for example, are heading back to the Championship at the end of this season and it doesn’t seem particularly likely that manager Ivan Juric will be making that journey with them. Röhl, who has been managing in this division for two years and improving his reputation on the way, and who just happens to have formerly been on the coaching staff at St Mary’s, would be the perfect replacement.

And this all means that Sheffield Wednesday have to make a persuasive case for him to stay beyond the end of this season, but is this being presented if the club is having problems paying everyone with just a few weeks left to play? It certainly doesn’t feel like it, and Chansiri will almost certainly be inviting fresh new levels of anger from the club’s supporters should Röhl reach the ultimate conclusion this summer that he’d rather be at a club where at least he’ll get paid on time every month throughout the summer and next season. It’s not an unreasonable expectation.

Chansiri has spent big before. Over two seasons in 2016 and 2017 he threw money at trying to get Wednesday back into the Premier League, but the ultimate result was failure; two successive defeats in the playoffs, the Hillsborough sale, and ultimately a decline which led to relegation in 2021. No-one would realistically expect a repeat of those two seasons. It’s hardly as though they did the club any good, anyway.

But this isn’t the same thing as that by any stretch of the imagination. This is about competently managing the club as a business and making Sheffield Wednesday an attractive option for the sort of players that they need to be able to make that leap towards being able to seriously challenge for promotion. And what, exactly, is the argument making that case at the moment? Professional football is an insecure way to make a living, and players will shy away from any club where these sort of doubts exist.

And even if Chansiri may seek to underplay this as little more than a temporary blip, the club’s broader financial position—as at so many others in the Championship—could hardly be described as ‘rosey’. The last set of accounts were published at the end of last year, covering the 2023/24 season, and they showed losses increasing from £7.2m to £8.9m despite revenue increasing £7.0m from £19.3m following promotion at the end of the previous season. If you’re bringing in more money but your losses are still increasing, you’re doing something fundamentally wrong. Everybody knows that the Championship isn’t fair.

With relations between Chansiri and the club’s supporters, there are essentially two agreeable ways in which this reaches a conclusion; either Wednesday get promoted into the Premier League, or Chansiri finally gives this up as a bad job and sells the club—and the stadium—to someone who can make a better fist of running it than he has.

There are, of course, also numerous ways in which it could conclude badly. It just so happens that the supporters have ridden most of these rodeos before, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that alarm bells are ringing yet again. The question is, what happens next? Just because all concerned have been here before, it doesn’t mean supporters should have to be putting up with this sort of thing yet again.

Accompanying image by Arne Müseler / arne-mueseler.com / CC-BY-SA-3.0