“Blades Glory — Owls Down.”
This May will be 36 years since a now-iconic front-page headline from the Green ’Un, Sheffield’s Saturday night sports paper, beautifully captured the mood of a divided footballing city.
As United celebrated promotion to the top flight under Dave Bassett, Wednesday were heading in the opposite direction after a horrendous final day of the season at Hillsborough.
All these years on and a fair number of those front pages survive in the red half of the Steel City, some proudly framed on the wall at home. Others are tucked away in a drawer, only to be brought out on special occasions. Or when a Wednesdayite pops round for tea.
Speak to those Blades fans old enough to remember that boiling hot Saturday in May 1990, when these two bitter rivals effectively swapped places in the old First Division, and invariably they will insist it is the best day of their footballing lives. Those of a blue-and-white persuasion will say the opposite.
Sunday, February 22, 2026, may well become the modern-day equivalent for a younger generation of Sheffielders after Wednesday’s relegation to the third tier, the earliest in Football League history, was confirmed via a 2-1 defeat at the home of their old foe.
The natives certainly revelled in a demise that had been signposted for months, an 18-point deduction imposed in the autumn by the EFL for breaches of financial regulations following a summer that had seen wages go unpaid and a host of key players depart.
“You’re going down, you’re going down, Wednesday’s going down,” the red-and-white hordes sang over and over again during the closing stages of a hard-fought derby that had featured red cards for United’s Kalvin Phillips and the visitors’ Gabriel Otegbayo, plus a flurry of yellows.
There were also mischievous chants in praise of Dejphon Chansiri, the Thai businessman whose ruinous decade-long reign at Hillsborough ended in rancour and then administration last October.
Those jibes are likely to continue for months, maybe even years. Sheffield is a city where footballing passions run high, as Chris Wilder, a lifelong United fan and now in his third spell as manager, made clear after condemning Wednesday to the drop.
“We had to be ruthless,” he says. “This is the nature of the business, and no one would have it any other way. No Sheffield Wednesday fan has celebrated a Sheffield United victory and no Sheffield United fan has celebrated a Sheffield Wednesday achievement.
“I don’t remember the phone ringing when Tommy Watson stuck the winner in (for Sunderland in last season’s Championship play-off final, condemning Wilder’s United to defeat at Wembley), and people saying, ‘That was a bit unfortunate, unlucky’.
“That’s just the nature of the game. Especially in one city. There are 135 years (of rivalry). I don’t think it’s out of order to say that. That’s football rivalry. It’s the tribal part of football and just how it is.”
Sheffield United fans release red flares before the game against their city rivals (Cameron Smith/Getty Images)
Thanks to the intensity of this historic rivalry, a sell-out crowd had come to bury Wednesday at Bramall Lane, not praise them. By full time, however, even the most one-eyed United fan must have grudgingly appreciated the fighting spirit shown by their rivals in the most adverse of circumstances.
A goal down inside 75 seconds and then two behind before the 20-minute mark had been reached in this latest instalment of a derby first played in 1890, things couldn’t have looked much bleaker for a team with just one Championship victory to their name all season.
Then, however, Phillips was sent off four minutes into the second half for a clumsy lunge at Svante Ingelsson, and suddenly Wednesday believed.
Soon after, Charlie McNeill halved the deficit with a pinpoint finish from just inside the penalty area, and Wednesday’s tails were up.
Where before the 2,300 away fans had been forced to endure the first-half mocking by their rivals, now it was their voices being heard. “You’ve only come to see the Wednesday,” they sang after the attendance was announced over the PA system as 30,457.
Further chances followed, not least when the ball found McNeill 20 yards out late on, only for the Manchester United academy graduate to fire high and wide. But the equaliser just wouldn’t come.
When Otegbayo became the second player dismissed, this time on 90 minutes for a second caution after tugging back Tyrese Campbell, the game was up.
“It’s painful to be relegated in February,” said Wednesday manager Henrik Pedersen, handed one of the toughest jobs in football last summer as the unpaid bills stacked up and players such as Josh Windass, Anthony Musaba, Djeidi Gassama and Michael Smith headed for the exit, destined not to be replaced.
“But we were not relegated today. A tough, tough season. There have been many low points.”
Little blame can be attached to either Pedersen or a squad so decimated that the starting XI on Sunday contained five free transfers, five loanees, and an academy graduate in Otegbayo.
There were another eight teenagers on the bench, plus forward Ike Ugbo, a £2.5million ($3.4m) signing from Troyes who is yet to score in the Championship after 54 appearances.
As the Wednesday fans warmly applauded their team at the final whistle and the United squad posed for a group photograph in front of the Kop to capture this latest derby win for posterity, it was hard not to think back to that day in May 1990 when success for one half of the city was topped by the painful demise of the other.
Sunday will have hurt. Losing a derby is always painful, but throw in relegation as well and recovery will not be easy.
Throw in the likelihood of Wednesday finishing the season on a minus points total, as seems likely, with seven of those 18 points deducted in the autumn still to be reclaimed, and these are bleak days at Hillsborough.
However, as happened in 1990, when Wednesday went down as the other lot went up, these darkest of dark days can be followed by dawn breaking and eventually the return of sunshine.
Within a year of going down under Ron Atkinson 36 years ago, Wednesday were back in the top flight, promoted as League Cup winners after beating Manchester United at Wembley.
The following season, they finished third as Trevor Francis continued the free-flowing style of his predecessor as a prelude to four Wembley visits in 48 days during the spring of 1993.
Included in that quartet of forays to the national stadium was a Steel City derby in the FA Cup semi-final that ended in victory for Wednesday and a much more palatable headline on the back of the Sheffield Star to perfectly illustrate the ever-shifting sands of a city’s football landscape: Owls Cheers… Blades Tears.