Sheffield Wednesday, one of England’s oldest soccer clubs, is in crisis
London – One of the oldest world football teams is in great difficulty.
When the Sheffield Wednesday FC launched the new season on Sunday – far from Leicester City in the championship, the second level of British football – more than 3,000 travel fans will not take their place to encourage their beloved team, known as Owls.
Instead, they will hold a five -minute demonstration outside the King Power stadium from Leicester against a man: Thai businessman Dejphon Chansiri, the owner of Wednesday and the focal point of an increasing crisis that could threaten his very existence.
The team’s financial problems are riding, and the unsuccessful attempts to sell it dominated local sports media and online forums for months – and the crisis has much broader implications for the health of English football far from the sumptuous riches of Liverpool and Manchester City.
The problem is so sharp that the British government has adopted a new law which will launch a football regulator to control the purchase and sale of teams and ensure that the owners are “in shape and appropriate”.
For Wednesday, founded in 1867, it could be too little, too late.
Some teams have bad seizures, but this summer saw on Wednesday establishing new levels of chaos: players and staff have not been paid in time in the past four months. Consequently, a transfer embargo prohibits the club from buying new players until January 2027 – even if it could afford it.
At least 15 players left free transfers or for a fraction of their market value this summer, leaving enough players to fill a match team of 11 runners and up to nine replacements.
“He becomes a soap opera,” said Dan Fudge, who co-hosts the popular podcast “The Wednesday Week”.
“Usually, as a podcasters, we scrape ourselves for the content to speak during the summer,” said Fudge, “but we seem to have had a new chronology of terror every week to speak.”
The list of misadventures continues. The young talented head coach Danny Rohl, a charismatic and cerebral German, praised for a great success in the main European leagues, left by a mutual agreement.
The famous Old Hillsborough Stadium is literally collapsing – the Sheffield Municipal Council refused to grant a security license for the large northern stand with 9,000 places due to the concerns of discovering wiring and cracks on the terrace.
The club said in a statement this week that he worked to solve this problem and would seek to place subscription holders elsewhere if it was still closed by the first home game on August 16. A disabled fan whose accessible headquarters is in the northern stand fled to tears this week during the disposition of the BBC how effect the crisis has on him.
The club did not respond to the request for comments from NBC News.
Chansiri says he wants to sell, but no one so far has respected his assessment for the club, which football finance experts say it’s too high. The owner would have offered the club for 100 million pounds ($ 134 million). Kieran Maguire, an expert and commentator of leading British football, puts real value at 40 million pounds ($ 53 million), but Chansiri said in June that he had rejected an offer at this price of a consortium based in the United States.
Maguire said it was unlikely that Wednesday is completely bursting, but he said that, in any case, the team would almost certainly be relegated to the league below and would face a very difficult season.
“He is not malicious in the sense that he does not want to destroy the football club, but he is very naive, has no knowledge of the industry,” said Maguire.
The culture of English football is that of expenses. This summer only, the 20 first League teams spent around 1.8 billion pounds ($ 2.4 billion) on transfer fees, the title champions Liverpool spanning 252 million pounds ($ 335 million).
And the contrast between the top and the rest of the football pyramid system is striking.
Between them, the Premier League clubs have achieved more than 6 billion pounds (8 billion dollars) in income during the 2024-25 season, an increase of 36% compared to the previous year, according to the consulting firm Deliitte.
Meanwhile, each championship team, the highest fifth attended the League in Europe, carried out an operational defeat during the same period for the second consecutive season.
There is money from television, sponsorship, sales of players and matters of the day of the match, but with huge salary bills, clubs must rely on player sales and, if they are lucky, rich benefactors to inject money.
The English football league said on Wednesday that it was in “advanced discussions” with Chansiri lawyers on the way he will sell his participation in the club. The league, criticized by certain fans for not having acted earlier, warned the Thai magnate that the club had to “respect its obligations or make fun of its commitment to sell at a well -funded party, for a fair market value”.
Could things even get worse? Probably.
This week, the Morecambe FC, a team from the seaside city in the northwest of the same name, was suspended from the National League, the fifth level of the league system in the shape of a English football pyramid, with the elite clubs at the top and smaller parish clubs down.
Morecambe has not complied with his financial obligations, and if a new buyer who can support him cannot be found, he could disappear for good. This happened to MacClesfield Town, Bury, Hereford and a handful of other teams whose owners could not support them and whose passives were too large.
“There is a press feeling [stages] A takeover, ”said Fudge.
“Then, in recent years, you have seen teams like Bury and what recently happened to Morecambe, and they have not had this white knight, and suddenly we think:” Oh, hang on to a minute, we could be the big scalp. “”
Like many fans, Fudge has no doubt that is to blame. “Pure ineptime is the way we are here, whatever the warning signs around Chansiri since about 2018.”
Fans warmly remember from the 1990s, when players such as Chris Waddle, David Hirst and Walker – all the internationals of England – aligned themselves alongside some of the talents closest to Europe, helping the club reach seventh place in the Premier League during the 1996-97 season.
Fans were optimistic when Chansiri – A Scion of Thai Union group, a seafood conglomerate that has the seafood tuna tuna brand in the United States – took over in 2015. He promised and delivered some success, bringing the team to the final of the 2016 championship playoffs, just 90 minutes from returning to the Premier League.
All this seems very, for a very long time, fans wondering what form the new football regulator will take and if it will make a difference.
David Blunkett, a superior minister of the government of Tony Blair in the 1990s and 2000s and now a member of the Lord House, is a Wednesday fan for life and attended an online meeting with the football league on Thursday. He said it was “vital” that the crisis on Wednesday was approached before the regulator’s implementation.
“Parliamentarians, including those who represent the city, the confidence of supporters and other fans will clearly continue to put pressure on immediate resolution of the crisis in Hillsborough,” he told NBC News.
Originally from the northern side of Sheffield in the South Yorkshire, a city famous for its steel, Wednesday has become a first member of the Association Football (the term “football” is an abbreviation of “the association”), while the enthusiasm of football has balanced the communities of the working class in the North and the Midlands.
The team obtained its unique name of cricket: in the middle of the 19th century, there were several teams in Sheffield playing this match, and the one who played on Wednesday started a football team. The name is stuck.
Fans will withdraw from banners on Sunday and cry slogans to try to preserve this story. Even if some just prefer to watch the match.
“There are a lot of people who are very in the camp of” protesting, letting this message across as much as possible “, this with which I completely agree, but it is not the bag of everyone, because many people use football to spend time with their family and friends,” said Fudge.
Despite the club’s turmoil, Wednesday sold its allowance of 3,287 tickets outside for Sunday’s match. It is not immediately clear how many Wednesday matches there will be.
