Five months is a long time in football. At the end of May, Sheffield Wednesday were celebrating one of their greatest days when Josh Windass’s late, late header finally broke Barnsley in the League One play-off final at Wembley. It was the most dramatic end to the most awful slog of a game, and Windass just about mustered the energy to run to the corner and slide on the grass, to be enveloped by a sea of blue and white shirts.
Then, three weeks before the start of the Championship season, Wednesday were stunned when popular manager Darren Moore walked away citing irreconcilable differences with the outspoken owner, Thai businessman Dejphon Chansiri, a man who doesn’t tend to reconcile differences. The summer’s optimism washed away. Moore’s replacement, Xisco Munoz, failed to win a single game in his first 12 and was sacked last month.
While the club was bottom of the Championship, digesting their worst-ever start to a league season, disgruntled fans protested against Chansiri’s ownership. Their frustration over Moore’s sudden departure and Xisco’s disastrous appointment had stirred long-term concerns about financial mismanagement, managerial churn, scattergun recruitment and a lack of obvious strategy.
Chansiri was furious and issued a statement vowing not to invest any more of his money in the club. He defended high ticket prices, hit out at misbehaving fans for accruing club fines, complained he was being treated unfairly and said the protests against him were “a waste of time”.
“You have no right to ask me to leave,” he wrote. “I am the one who saved the club and spent the money for the club, I am the one who needs to pay around £2m on average every month [to keep the club afloat]. Some fans need to have more respect for owners of clubs and not be so selfish.”
But worse – and more bizarre – was to come when, last week, Wednesday were placed under a player registration embargo, owing to an unpaid tax bill. Chansiri, in his wisdom, threw down the gauntlet to supporters in a wild interview withthe Sheffield Star, telling them to rustle up £2m themselves to cover the outstanding debt and player wages, or risk losing the club.
It was an extraordinary request – has an owner ever before demanded fans pay a club’s bills?
The clock was ticking, with a potentially ruinous transfer ban stretching across three windows if the money wasn’t found. Chansiri warned fans: “If you don’t want to save your club, then don’t call yourselves the owners and me the custodian.” It is a line he has repeated many times down the years: the notion that supporters are the true owners of historic football clubs, and that he is just a steward, clearly irks him.
Sheffield Wednesday fans rejoice at Wembley during the League One play-off final— (Getty)
Chansiri, in fairness, has poured somewhere in the region of £150m into Sheffield Wednesday since he took over in 2015. He has been a little unlucky, perhaps, losing the Championship playoff final in 2016 with a place in the Premier League’s promised land so close. His personal finances – Chansiri made his fortune in canned tuna – were badly damaged by the pandemic, and the club suffered too.
But his ownership has often been chaotic, summed up by his efforts to avoid breaching financial rules by buying Hillsborough Stadium for £61m in 2019. The controversial move didn’t work, because an investigation found that money from the stadium’s sale should not have been included in the club’s accounts. Wednesday were hit by a six-point penalty the following season and were relegated to League One.
Fans have continually voiced concerns over how Wednesday are being managed. It is often the hallmark of a well-run club when they can sell good players for profit and keep improving, but according to Transfermarkt, Wednesday haven’t received a transfer fee in two years.
“It has felt like a lot of money spent badly with no real long-term plan,” says Tom Scott of the Sheffield Wednesday Supporters’ Trust, set up three years ago in response to the crisis which ended in a points deduction. “I think that’s where a lot of the frustrations get missed between the owner and the fans. We’re not demanding money be spent, and ultimately the decisions are his to be made. It’s just felt like the money’s been badly spent.”
There have been regular barbs directed at supporters along the way, and this latest outlandish statement calling on fans to pay the club’s tax bill and player wages has been interpreted by some as an attack on fans’ loyalty.
Yet this week the players were paid and the tax bill was cleared too. Given his interview with the Sheffield Star was conducted only a couple of days earlier, Chansiri might have known that these payments would be met. Did he ever really need a bailout from fans? His threat to supporters smacked of an owner goading the fanbase and asserting his power – look how much you need me.
On announcing that the debts were cleared, Chansiri denied playing “games” with the fans. “This was a serious situation,” he insisted. “I said if 20,000 fans paid £100 each it would resolve the issue. I was making the situation totally clear if I did not have the available funds, but ultimately it did not come to that.”
So crisis averted off the pitch, for now, although Chansiri has still not reversed his position on refusing to invest more money in the club, nor has he given reassurances over next month’s payments.
On the pitch, there are some green shoots under new manager Danny Rohl, whose brand of fast football has already got pulses racing at Hillsborough. Wednesday showed bright signs in Rohl’s first two games in charge, despite defeats, before they dismantled Rotherham last weekend to earn their first win of the season. Former Tottenham and England coach Chris Powell has joined as Rohl’s assistant, something of a coup.
Danny Rohl has quickly put his stamp on the team— (PA)
People inside the club say Chansiri is passionate about his football project and cares deeply about Sheffield Wednesday, even if they can’t always explain exactly why he decided to buy them. But players and staff will be alarmed by recent developments, and it is hard to know where the already strained relationship between fans and owner goes from here.
Chansiri has said in the past that he would consider fair offers for the club, but none are thought to be forthcoming, and besides, he says a lot of things.
“My hope is that we can have some meaningful dialogue with the chairman,” says Scott, “because it’s very hard to sit in the same room as him to talk about where the club can go from here.
“The problem is that fans feel a bit like he’s taking them for a ride. When it comes to the club that you follow, no matter what he says, you put a lot of money into it. Fans go to games, buy shirts, buy tickets, and in terms of a proportion to their own income, it’s a heck of an investment. So to carry on this line that the fans don’t support their club is something that we’re either going to get past, or we’re not. And if we don’t get past it, I can’t see where it goes.
“I think these repeated attacks on the fans and their loyalty, it’s only ever going to end up in one direction.”
For now, though, Sheffield Wednesday and Chansiri are stuck with one another.
