The protests have been deliberately organised by the Sheffield Wednesday Supporters’ Trust to be obvious on a day when Sky Sports is in town. Empty seats and messages pulled across the sky by a plane are their weapons. Nothing is futile.
The away end makes up for their brief absence with doubly noisy chants of mutiny. They sing louder and prouder and with lumps in their throat. One of the great ironies of supporting a football club in crisis is that the away days are often the best you can remember, bringing you closer together.
Leicester City fans applaud Sheffield Wednesday supporters in solidarity amid the club’s ongoing financial struggles, as fans hold off entering the stadium in protest. pic.twitter.com/gz7rpMwB0F
— Sky Sports Football (@SkyFootball) August 10, 2025Members of the trust, including chair Ian Bennett, are selling scarves because fans have been boycotting the purchase of official club merchandise. Thousands of yellow cards are being distributed with a quote from owner Dejphon Chansiri: “If the fans want me to sell, I’ll sell.”
There are good spirits here, the type of camaraderie that comes when a group of deeply committed people are united behind a single cause. Amongst them is Matt Johnson and his father. Johnson and his friend James Mappin host the Wednesday ‘Til I Die podcast. The real fear is that it may be their club that dies first.
The Supporters’ Trust says it will continue to protest until Chansiri is removed from his post (Photo: PA)After the final whistle, I took a photo from the back of the South Stand of supporters walking over the short bridge and spilling out onto Parkside Road and beyond: parents and children, young couples, an elderly gent and a group of mates. You could only see the back of their heads but you knew that they were smiling.
We are repeatedly told not to get excited in August – nascent pride tends to lead to eventual fall. But it is mostly nonsense advice and mostly ill-advised to tell anyone how to apportion their fun. When you have supported this club over the last half decade, you take your chances when they come.
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The last five months of Sheffield Wednesday have been – even in the context of what came before – an omnishambles of unforgivable depth and breadth. It would be ghoulish to rank football clubs by their proximity to the apocalypse, but Wednesday are closer than most. The knowns are frightening and the unknowns are worse.
The squad, almost an afterthought due to the greater emergency about funding, is pitifully thin. Wednesday have 16 first-team players, including only one goalkeeper. Relegation appears as a nine-month formality, an extended gut punch on repeat.
The mental impact is real. Johnson is a teacher and every time his watch or phone pings, he is panicking that it is another setback and desperate for a lesson to end so he can find out.
“I was on holiday 10 days ago. The first three days, where not a lot was really happening, was fine. During the last four days of that holiday, I’m glued to my phone when I should be spending time with my five-year-old son and my wife. I shouldn’t be fielding phone calls and researching into Portuguese silent personal advisors to the chairman – it’s nonsense.
“I think the overriding emotion used to be anger,” Mappin says.
“Add to that some denial, for sure. This has been such a hard battle but you try to deny that it’s happening, or as bad as it is, because that’s the only way you feel that you can protect yourself.”
Nathaniel Chalobah’s opening goal gave Owls supporters something to cheer about (Photo: PA)Reports suggest that Chansiri remains intent on securing a sale price higher than any sense or reason. This is a club with a long list of creditors, that does not own its stadium, that has lost its most valuable assets for below their true value due to the financial chaos and which is surely heading back to the third tier. If there was ever an argument for cutting your losses and abandoning a fruitless, farcical attempt to cling onto power, it is here.
By the end of the week, the EFL confirmed that Wednesday were no longer under the registration embargo after settling debts to players, staff and other clubs (reportedly after they received Premier League solidarity payments). We can presume that the EFL threat worked, given the expedited timeframe. That is both good news (they can still not pay a transfer or loan fee but at least the staff have been paid), but also highlights just how low the bar for that good news stands.
After the five-minute protest delay at kick-off, Sheffield Wednesday fans file into their seats and are roundly applauded by the Leicester City supporters around them. Eventually that corner of the King Power is full with those intent on giving support to those on the pitch and treating the owner with the opprobrium the situation merits.
“I’m probably coming out of a sense of duty, and yes probably out of habit,” he says. “But mainly I’m here because I want to show support to the players and the coaching staff because they are the most public facing figures of this club.
Henrik Pedersen’s first game in charge ended in defeat at the King Power Stadium (Photo: PA)
Or maybe he travelled because mini-miracles can still happen and reward people meeting them halfway. At no point during the previous week have I considered that Sheffield Wednesday might be an opening weekend opponent you would not want to face. And then the game starts and the charging power of adrenalin and emotion is visible from space.
It could never last. Chalobah pulled his hamstring during the first half and limped off. Even allowing for a touch of clock management in the second half, multiple Wednesday players required treatment and Yan Valery also went off injured. Bannan is sent off for two yellow cards, the second a sliding challenge with a late follow through. That is three players who will now be missing.
At full-time, the players in white were sucked over to the away end by sheer goodwill; they were going there anyway. These are not the best players that Wednesday have ever had, although Bannan might make an all-time XI now. But they are heroes because they are still here and because they have been through more than they deserve. It is not their fault and their own careers could be jeopardised, too.
As such, there are two calamities here. The first is the great wastage: Chansiri took over a club that was nine points off the Championship play-offs and last season they finished 10 points off the Championship play-offs.
All that money, energy, emotion, anger and time, and for what? To end up back where you started and everything else broken. The only thing Wednesday have to show for it is a magical League One play-off campaign and a hundred deep scars.
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Here, the hopes are pitifully unambitious and yet still sit out of reach: to have four open stands; to be able to buy a footballer; to have hot water in toilets in all of the stadium; to not wince every time the name of their club is in a headline; to have an owner who pays everybody on time and communicates with supporters; to have a football club where the focus is on football.
That creates a devastatingly simple scenario that cuts through this sorry tale. If any of it happens between now and May, it will have been a successful season for Sheffield Wednesday. If none of it happens, coming to watch this club in this form on the opening day of next season may not be possible. It must not be left to die.
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