Sheffield Wednesday are decaying, and no-one is doing a thing to prevent it
They're supposed to be celebrating their 160th anniversary, but instead a club from the home of football is on the brink and the silence is deafening.
When you’ve been writing about this sort of thing for a long time, you get to read the signs of it very quickly indeed. The talk of wages being paid late, the uncovering of infrastructural issues that had been set aside in the rush to spend more and more money on players.
The breathless searching for billionaires who could be persuaded to step in and make everything okay, and the inevitable tyre-kickers. The terse statements of the governing bodies. The embargoes and sweating over potential future points deductions. The concerns over whether matches will go ahead, and the slow, dawning realisation that yeah, everybody involved in this is only interested in themselves. The death of a football club or its casting into the wilderness has an aesthetic entirely of its own. It’s one that we used to pretend didn’t ultimately happen, until Bury happened.
I have been writing about the EFL all summer. Mostly it’s been harmless fluff, transfer rumours and the like. But one club has been increasingly hogging the headlines this summer, and as someone who’s been writing about lousy football club owners for almost twenty years, it’s felt, in a way, like coming home, albeit in a way that I would never want to do.
In among the pre-season excitement, the gaudy transfer stories, the willing for our weekend routines to get back to normal, an established football club, a name with which we are all familiar, is dying, and it doesn’t really feel as though anyone is doing very much to prevent it. I’m not talking about Morecambe, here. That’s a whole other can of worms for another day. I’m talking about Sheffield Wednesday.
Sheffield Wednesday are dying, having the life squeezed out of them, and what has become really, really striking as the summer has progressed has been how little has really been said about this anywhere. Major media outlets seem too wrapped up in the pre-season excitement to devote much space to it. But what has been surprising has been the extent to which the governing bodies of the game have been, as well.
The Premier League, of course, won’t say a word. Wednesday aren’t a Premier League club, and haven’t been in a quarter of a century. Indeed, were they a Premier League club, this almost certainly wouldn’t be happening to them. But what of the others? The Football Association, beyond organising the various national teams, and the FA Cup, Trophy and Vase? Do they simply not have one any more?
And even their silence isn’t as surprising as that of the EFL. They haven’t made a statement about anything since the 25th July and that - oh irony of ironies - was on the subject of the Football Governance Act. The only comment they’ve publicly made on the absolute state of one of their best-supported clubs has been the announcement of a three-window transfer embargo that few, on the basis of everything we’ve seen this last few weeks, seriously believe the club has much more than a 50-50 chance of even getting to the end of.
In the meantime… nothing. The BBC have been told that the League is “increasingly concerned” over the state of the club, but no name is attached to this, and even notwithstanding that, well… we’re all concerned about it, aren’t we? It would be extremely alarming if those working within the EFL looked at what’s been playing out this summer at Hillsborough and thought, “ain’t no thing”. But the lack of public comment, despite the very real threat that this team could be failing to fulfil fixtures is a real possibility, is a troubling abrogation of responsibility.
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The signs of cracks appearing in the structure of Sheffield Wednesday have been hiding in plain sight for years, but they accelerated last season, half-hidden by the fact that mercurial if occasionally tetchy young head coach Danny Röhl was getting the team playing well above where it should have been. Wednesday finished last season 12th in the Championship, when going by their wage bill they should have been involved in the enorm-o-scrap to avoid relegation that was going on until the last minute of the last weekend of the season.
But those cracks were becoming more visible nevertheless. At the end of October, wages and HMRC weren’t paid on time. In January, there was talk of a rupture in the relationship between Röhl and the club’s permanently confused-looking owner Dejphon Chansiri. The bills weren’t paid on time again at the end of March. As if by stealth, a summer of crisis was building up, and still very precious few even seemed to notice what was starting to emerge from being hidden in plain sight.
At the end of the season, the wheels very quickly started to fall off the wagon. Röhl’s patience with this shit-show had clearly already reached the end of its tether. He was linked to the vacant jobs at Leicester and Southampton but was overlooked by both of them, and interest in him from a couple of Bundesliga clubs, including Werder Bremen and Wolfsburg, fell flat because of a release clause in his contract which was rumoured to be set at £5 million.
Röhl returned eventually, but was required to have “clear the air” talks with players evidently thoroughly pissed off by his decision to openly court other jobs and then come back to Hillsborough. Eventually, it was concluded that his position had become untenable and he left ‘by mutual consent’, with his former assistant Henrik Pedersen (who had, according to reports a clause in his contract offering him the job after Röhl) taking over instead.
They weren’t paid again at the end of May. This would have made for a messy enough summer on its own, but it really was the tip of the iceberg, and the wheels on the wagon really started flying in all directions when the wages weren’t paid again at the end of June. A transfer embargo had already been put in place by this time over last season’s shenanigans, but this failure felt all the more severe.
Under FIFA rules, players who aren’t paid on time can submit their written notice to leave a club after 15 days, and although the club managed to pay everything up some point round the middle of July, it wasn’t enough to persuade some of them that this was a club that they literally couldn’t afford to be around.
Josh Windass and Michael Smith were their two top goalscorers in the League last season, but they left for Wrexham and Preston North End respectively, two formerly contracted players - both worth money - leaving the club without anything changing hands. 15-year-old wunderkind Caelen-Kole Cadamarteri was offloaded to Manchester City on the proviso that two-thirds of the £1.5 million transfer fee was paid up front. Djeidji Gassama and Anthony Musaba were sold in what was starting to look like a fire sale.
And then at the end of July, they failed to pay everybody on time again. At the time of writing, Sheffield Wednesday have 16 senior players, and one of those, Max Lowe, is understood to have given his notice in as well. Others may or may not follow, and the transfer embargo highly restricts who they could get in. If the sort of player they’d want would agree to join a club who haven’t paid their staff on time for the last two months, that is.
They are due to be playing Leicester City away from home on Sunday afternoon. The players were due to be heading to Burnley for a behind closed doors friendly match on the 2nd August, but this had to be postponed when they refused to travel. They’re now threatening strike action.
Meanwhile, it also emerged that Chansiri's intransigence over Röhl's release clause had cost the club. It was reported that Wednesday has been offered close to a million pounds in compensation for the manager during the summer but had turned it down because he was holding out for the full amount of the release clause. Röhl, of course, ended up leaving the club for nothing, just like Windass and Smith.
So that’s all pretty bad, yeah? Well, we’re not done yet because meanwhile, Hillsborough itself has been crumbling. No investment has been put into the infrastructure in years, and it wasn’t just starting to show, it was starting to have very evident effects. The North Stand was the height of modernity when it was first built in 1960-61, but it’s almost of a pensionable age now, and it was denied a safety certificate after “extensive corrosion” was found in its roof.
Its closure isn’t just an apt visual metaphor for the absolute state of the club. It has real world consequences. Thousands of season tickets have been sold for that stand, and those people will have to be accommodated in a ground which has just had more than 9,000 wiped off its capacity.
Again, the devil could be found in the detail. There was talk that season tickets were being sold for this stand until the moment that the club were told it couldn’t be used any more, even though the club knew there was a potential issue because they’d requested an away match from EFL for the first weekend of the season.
The easy route out of all this would be for the club to be sold, but again Chansiri's pie in the sky valuations have gotten in the way. There was an American-led consortium interested, but they had two offers - later revealed to be £48 million and £55 million - rejected by the club, with the first of these described by the club as “derisory”.
Now, valuing a football club isn’t a precise science, but the trend in recent years for clubs at similar levels to sell for 1.5 to double their annual revenue, which values Wednesday at something like £40-50 million. But it has also been reported that Chansiri originally wanted £150 million for the club and had reduced this to “just” £100 million. And there are complications. Hillsborough is owned by a third-party company owned by Chansiri and the club pay £2.5 million a year in rent for the privilege. Why is this business reporting a profit while not maintaining the ground to a safe standard?
It feels as though Chansiri is trying to claw back some of the money he’s put into the club over the years. It’s been suggested that he's put something like £150-160 million into the club over the last ten and half years, but… that’s not how these things work.
Sheffield Wednesday are worth now what they’re worth now, and the spending that led to those losses happened on his watch. I recently wrote a piece about their five worst-ever signings, and three of them were from his first two years as owner, while a fourth had arrived a couple of months before him.
They've been losing money for years, but the ultimate responsibility for those losses rests with the owner. The value of your investment may go up or down, Mr Chansiri. You don't get a do-over when you come to sell it, if your spending hasn’t added value to the business. If I'm selling my car, I don’t build in the cost of all the MOTs and repair work I’ve carried out on it. It’s worth what it’s worth. That’s how it… works?
In the real world, Sheffield Wednesday owe millions of pounds to other clubs and have expensive repair work to carry out on their stadium, and they’re struggling to pay their wage bill & HMRC in the first place. They’ve already sold several of their more sellable playing assets already while another couple walked away.
They are a mess, and will take tens of millions of pounds to fix and then bring into the 21st century. Hillsborough needs more work than merely what’s necessary to make sure it's safe. That’s the bare minimum. That the Leppings Lane stand still exists is, frankly, astonishing. Hillsborough has barely changed in years, yet Chansiri has ramped up the price of season tickets to the one of the highest in the Championship. It’s as though he wants to wish the very nature of how market-based economies are supposed to work away.
For all the previous couple of thousand words, what matters here is that Sheffield Wednesday matter. They’re woven into the culture of the game in this country, and they could be run in a healthy, sustainable way. The decisions made at this club over the years have been made as a result of many different factors, among them definitely hubris and greed. The name of the stadium itself is irrevocably linked with British football’s worst stadium disaster, an indication of for how long this has been going on.
There seems to be little anger, just blithe feeling that it’ll all work out okay in the end. Well, maybe it will, but the new season starts this weekend, nothing has been resolved, and as things stand it can’t even be certain that their match at Leicester goes ahead on Sunday. It has felt as though matters at Sheffield Wednesday have been reaching critical mass for a while.
And the silence has felt deafening.