Sheffield Wednesday came apart as football clubs tend to do: slowly, and then all at once. Pinpointing the exact moment at which everything started to crumble is difficult. It may have been selling Hillsborough as quick-fix financial engineering. It may have been the points deduction, or relegation, or the overdue tax bill and the registration embargo — transfer ban, in the sport’s legalese.
The club’s fans saw all of these as harbingers of what was to come. Protests against Wednesday’s largely absentee owner, Dejphon Chansiri, have been gathering strength for at least a couple of years, increasingly desperate attempts not just to force his hand but to get anyone, outside Sheffield, to understand the seriousness of the situation.
They have, variously, thrown tennis balls on to the pitch to force games to be suspended. They have printed placards, staged marches, commissioned billboards, demanded boycotts of merchandise. They have abandoned the team’s blue and white in favour of yellow and black, the colours of toxic warning labels.
None of it has made the slightest bit of difference. It never does. It never can. Spiritually, like every club, Sheffield Wednesday belong to their fans. But spiritually does not hold up in a court of law. Legally, they are Chansiri’s. He is the owner. He was the shirt sponsor. His name is picked out in seats at the stadium. The club is his; the club is him.
Over the course of the last four months, all of the fans’ fears have been realised, one after the other. The club missed payroll in March, again in May. Chansiri blamed a cashflow issue and pleaded for patience. When the same thing happened in June, the players were allowed — under FIFA’s statutes — to seek to cancel their contracts for delayed payments. Two key members of Danny Röhl’s team did.
Last month, Wednesday’s scholars, teenage academy players, were warned to expect their first-ever paycheques to be late. Röhl, having stayed on far longer than most anticipated, finally left less than a fortnight before the season started. Chris Powell, one of Röhl’s departing assistants, expressed his sympathy for the “trauma” the club’s players and fans were experiencing. The players who had not left put out a statement asking for clarity.
Of all the myriad indignities, though, perhaps the most damning is the fact that Hillsborough’s North Stand is now under a prohibition notice. The club have failed to provide the council with “professional reassurance” that part of the stadium is “structurally compliant”. As a result, it will not be open for the start of the season.
The stadium, like the club as a whole, has been allowed to drift into a state of disrepair. Executives elsewhere in the EFL have compared Sheffield Wednesday to a ghost ship: there is no functioning board of directors; Chansiri is not around; the club’s financial director lives on the south coast and does not attend games. The day-to-day running of the club falls to Lindsey Hinton, the club secretary, described by many as “long-suffering”. David Blunkett, the former MP, is charged with hosting visiting dignitaries on matchdays.
These details are club-specific, but they fit what has become a familiar pattern. We are used to clubs in the EFL in general — and the Championship — finding themselves on the brink. We know the teams who have been through something similar: Derby, Bolton, Wigan, Birmingham, Reading. One club, Bury, did not make it.
We can make an educated guess what happens from here. There will be more punishments, ones that seem to hurt the club more than they hurt the owner. Chansiri has said he is willing to sell; there is a very good chance that any buyer that does emerge might well be less than ideal. “Anyone with a modicum of investment sense will be waiting for the club to go into administration,” said Rob Wilson, a professor at the University Campus of Football Business. Chansiri’s asking price, he said, is “artificially inflated”, skewed by his confusion of the money he has invested with how much it is actually worth.
We know that Wednesday face a “slow, painful, hand-to-mouth existence” for some time, but that may well be preferable. Clive Betts, MP for Sheffield South East, has warned that Wednesday face “complete collapse” if Chansiri does not find a way to sell. Ian Bennett, of the club’s Supporters’ Trust, believes “there is a genuine risk that it all ends with the club going out of business”.
We are apathetic to it. We think clubs live beyond their means and pay the price
Ian Bennett, Sheffield Wednesday Supporters’ Trust
We know that this is an existential matter, and yet it is hard not to wonder if perhaps it does not quite have the impact — outside Sheffield — that it should. The documentarian Adam Curtis named the tendency to watch something horrendous unfurling on the news and to feel so numb to sorrow that it is difficult to engage emotionally “Oh Dearism”. That is the only response people muster: muttering “Oh Dear”, and then swiping to the next video.
The fact that the rhythm of Wednesday’s suffering is so familiar — a club, it should be pointed out, who have won more league titles than Tottenham — suggests the same phenomenon applies to football clubs flirting with oblivion. There is always someone in financial peril – but only a handful of teams have skirted the edge.
“The general public has sort of become immune to the idea of another team not being able to meet their obligations,” said Wilson. “It’s almost become a case of ‘Insert Club Name Here’.”
That seems so curious as to be counter-intuitive. We cherish the depth and breadth of the game, yet we increasingly seem to accept the idea that clubs might go to the wall as the price of doing business, as well as to blame them for their fate.
“We are apathetic to it,” Bennett said. “People think clubs live beyond their means and pay the price.”
That is not quite true of Sheffield Wednesday, but it does not seem to matter. The club have been suffering for months, for years. The fans saw what was about to happen. It is just a shame that nobody else seemed to notice, until it was too late.
Photography by Carl Recine/Getty Images