Sheffield Wednesday issue two damning statements about themselves in one day
Three down to Sunderland at half-time, Sheffield Wednesday's team provided a timely reminder of exactly why the club's fans are so angry with everything at the moment.
They’d been playing for 37 minutes at Hillsborough when the ‘hooraying’ started to ring around an otherwise somewhat echoey stadium. It was coming from the away end. Sunderland, a club that has suffered more than its fair share of indignity over the last decade or so, are dreaming of the possibility of returning to the Premier League with a vibrant young team.
The contrast with the home side was striking. There’d been plenty of empty seats at kick-off. There were even more by the time 37 minutes had been played. Wednesday were already 3-0 down. Has a football club ever blown this much joy so quickly before? Perhaps Colne Dynamoes, who won the Northern Premier League with a financially-doped team in 1990 but then folded a few weeks later.
It certainly seems to difficult to believe that this match was being played just four months to the day since that sunny afternoon at Wembley when Josh Windass Houchened them into the Championship in the 120th minute of their League One play-off final against Barnsley.
Having come from four down in their semi-final against Peterborough before winning on penalty kicks, a whole other dramatic angle presented itself at the end of the final. The result was delirium, a feeling that perhaps Wednesday could break out of the torpor in which they’ve found themselves for most of this century, that this could finally be the beginning of the revival.
It took just a couple of weeks for things to start unravelling again. Darren Moore had finished the season on 96 points. In any other season, such a performance would have powered his team to automatic promotion. But on this occasion there were two who did even better, and despite this he got them up anyway; promotion duly followed through the play-offs.
Moore was popular, and his departure couldn’t have been more of a shock to supporters. Owner Dejon Chansiri, but of course, blamed the manager for wanting a vastly increased salary. It’s still not entirely clear what actually did happen. Chansiri may be eccentric but he doesn’t seem to be a liar, while of all the people working in football you simply wouldn’t expeect freed from Darren Moore, but the result was the same, regardless.
Xisco Munoz was the replacement. Is it unfair to judge him harshly, after just nine matches? Is he a symptom or a cause? The problem is that, even if you want to—by modern standards—be generous and give him the credit of patience, how long can that last while there are practically no signs whatsoever that the team he’s assembling is capable of anything?
They got past Stockport County in the first round of the Carabao Cup by the thinnest of margins, with the assistance of a 97th-minute equaliser and a penalty shootout (this did not feel like the epic feat that their previous penalty shootout had been), but then lost via the same means to Mansfield Town in the next round. In the league, their first eight games yielded two points, and they scored one goal in the calendar month of September.
Small wonder that Hillsborough looked so empty, especially when we remind ourselves that fans were paying up to £43 for the privilege of being there. Ticket prices have long been a bone of contention at Hillsborough, with fans continuing to pay through the nose for Chansiri’s incompetent financial management of the club.
So, what did he do, this owner of a business with a known precarious financial history, which is under-achieving and whose customers really feel as though they could do with an arm around their shoulder and a reminder that those who make money from Sheffield Wednesday care something like as much as those who pay through the nose to watch them do?
He issued yet another rambling statement, on the day of a match that was being played on live television—and for which it was clearly evident that some tickets were still available—in which he told all concerned that he would not be putting any further money into the club because the fans had hurt his feelings.
Dejphon Chansiri, the toychucker general, owner of Statement Wednesday Football Club, had done it again. Another genius move from the man who, over the course of exactly eight years and eight months, has taken the club from 9th place in the Championship to, umm, 24th place in the Championship, a period which has also included two years in League One. Xisco Munoz is their 17th manager since they last played Premier League football, and the 8th (permanent) manager they’ve had in eight years under their current owner.
Chansiri has put more than £70m into Sheffield Wednesday over the years, so what has he got for his money? A stadium in need of renovation, the name of which still sends a shudder through a generation of supporters, and eight years—two of which took place in League One—of earache, seems to be more or less the full answer.
And he is responsible for this himself. Without a sporting director for almost four years, the club has become a curious mixture of the eccentrically-managed and rudderless. There have been persistent stories of wages being paid late while recruitment has, broadly speaking, been atrocious. Most believe that Chansiri does care. There have also been reports of highly animated shouting matches. He just doesn’t seem to be… very good at it.
Dejphon Chansiri may have needed more money to sustain his Premier League ambitions with Sheffield Wednesday, but when you start raising ticket prices to the extent to which he has, expectations will start to rise with them. It becomes a financial commitment as well as an emotional one. People may well start asking, “What am I actually paying for here?”, the more they’re paying per match.
The reported attendance at Hillsborough for this match was a little shy of 26,000, but this included a sold-out away end, as is usually the case when Sunderland come to town, and was it was also likely a reported attendance figure which assumed the attendance of all season-ticket holders. Hillsborough has a capacity of 34,835, these days. There’s no way it was three-quarters full at kick-off, and it certainly wasn’t by the end.
The need for money has clearly been desperate at times. That is, if not quite ‘normal’ at a football club outside the Premier League, at least comprehensible. What has been somewhat less so over the years has been the club’s repeated policy of just letting players run down contracts and leave, without making much of an effort to sell them first.
This would sort of decision-making would normally be part of the standard operational procedures of most professional football clubs, but at Sheffield Wednesday the fact that it does not happen has simply become another apparent symptom of the carelessness with which the club seems to be run, all the worse because their finances have been so bad for so long. On the basis of everything we’ve seen over its opening two months, they’re certainly in no fit state to be in the Championship this season, and ultimate responsibility for that falls squarely and unequivocably with Dejphon Chansiri.
Small wonder Hillsborough was so empty by the end of this match. And small wonder those who remained were so vocal in their contempt for a man who so routinely blames them for his own shortcomings.