Sheffield Wednesday owner demands that fans pay for his incompetence

Dejphon Chansiri has demanded that fans pay the £20m that he apparantly has not paid to HMRC for his players' tax and NI.

It should be clear and it should be obvious, but it still somehow feels as though it needs to be said. It is not the responsibility of the supporters of Sheffield Wednesday to pay the club’s tax and National Insurance obligations. Sometimes it’s just good to get these things out. The only serious reaction to the news that Dejphon Chansiri, the owner of the club, wants £2m from supporters to pay these outstanding liabilities was, “Jesus, aren’t they already paying enough?”.

Wednesday have the second highest average season ticket price in the Championship this season, at an eye-watering £623. It seems reasonable to suggest that, their epic 2-0 home win against Rotherham United on the last Saturday of October notwithstanding, supporters paying those prices haven’t exactly receiving been a premium product, this season. The Rotherham win was their first league win of two in all competitions, the other coming on penalty kicks against Stockport County in the first round of the EFL Cup in August.

In the meantime, they’ve offloaded Xisco Munoz and replaced him with Danny Rohl, an appointment quite from left-field, and brought in Chris Powell as his assistant. The Rotherham match was their first home match in charge. A corner turned? Well, let’s not get carried away, there, but since their previous league record this season had seen them take three points from thirteen games (three draws and ten defeats), it probably is fair to say that yes, winning a match does count as definite progress.

Of course, following up something cheery with crushing disappointment is something of a Wendesday tradition by this point, and it only took a couple of days from this first win for Chansiri to open his mouth and remove all doubt again. His demand for 20,000 people to pay him an extra £100 because he is both financially incontinent and incompetent was almost bafflingly wrong-headed. Truly, only somebody with substantially more money than sense could think in any way that this was an acceptable thing to say.

Firstly, Wednesday’s season tickets had already received a big price increase during the summer. The most expensive ticket in the newly announced prices was an adult seat in the South Stand, costing £630, a £70 increase on the £560 it cost a year earlier. Secondly, he’s already charging the second highest amount in the entire Championship for what has, thus far, by some distance been its worst team.

And thirdly, this… isn’t how business works. Tax and National Insurance are business expenses. When Sheffield Wednesday agreed contracts with their players, the PAYE system required the club to pay the commensurate amounts to HMRC. It is beyond absurd to expect your customers, who are already paying premium prices for a sub-par product at a level already vastly increased from last year, and during a cost of living crisis, to fund the fact that you haven’t been aside the proportion of your staff’s wages which were to be paid to HMRC that you should have been. This, in many respects, is the most infuriating aspect of all of this. It’s not even his money to withhold.

Talking of money that isn’t his to withhold, Chansiri is also a liar, having implied in his latest statement that the payment of wages could also be affected by this, only for it to later emerge that despite his comments the previous day, the players had been paid on time for the end of the month. This allowed for a small sigh of relief on the part of supporters. If the players aren’t getting paid, your club is in serious, serious trouble. And considering that Chansiri had thrown his toys out the pram and told the world that he would be stopping funding of the club just a few weeks earlier, there was a possibility that this could come to pass.

The end of September was the last time that we were all here, discussing this basketcase of a club. 28 days later—and that seems appropriate, considering the horror show they’d put on throughout those four weeks—they’d scored no goals throughout the month of October and had picked up a single point from a goalless draw against Huddersfield Town.

It wasn’t much of a return for the supporters who’d made the journey to the three away matches that they’d lost without scoring a goal in that time. Anyone who made the three away return journeys during this period from Sheffield, to West Bromwich Albion, Watford and Plymouth Argyle, made total round-trips amounting to 1,084 miles. On Saturday they travel to Bristol City, another 366 miles. Prior to the Rotherham match, home and away supporters hadn’t seen their team score in their previous six successive matches, going back to the 19th September.

Even taking into account this win, they remain eight points adrift of the fourth-bottom spot in the table, and while that win will give supporters some degree of confidence perhaps this managerial roll of the dice—the ninth that Wednesday have had since Chansiri bought the club from Milan Mandaric for £37.5m in January 2015—can arrest their dismal start to the season.

But just as the exhilirating high of their dramatic promotion form League One at the end of last season seemingly had to be followed by Chansiri doing something dickish, so, it would appear, the same had to happen after the Rotherham win. The timing is such that you start to wonder whether it’s deliberate. And the argument that he’s ‘put millions into the club’ is weak sauce, when you consider that he’s already claimed Hillsborough for himself, the cost of admission for supporters, that the money put into the club is in loans which would even give him a degree of control over the club’s fate were they to actually end up in administration, and that he’s currently charging Wednesday £2.5m a year in rent just to stay at Hillsborough.

If anything, Chansiri deserves little more than cancelled season tickets for next season. The remarkable loyalty of these supporters—26,000 were at Hillsborough for the Rotherham match—is substantially more than he deserves. At this stage, Sheffield Wednesday need himn out of their club. The only danger associated with this is, considering his petulance and childishness with this absurd screeds that he periodically send out, could he be trusted to do anything like the right thing in making his exit? The jury, for now, is out on that, and in the meantime Sheffield Wednesday will likely continue to flounder.