Sheffield Wednesday fans are the only thing keeping their club alive ...Middle East

It is a few minutes into Sheffield Wednesday’s Championship season and there are only a handful of their own people there to see it. In their place, a large banner has been placed across the seats. It reads: “SWFC for sale – enough is enough”. It is hard to think of a more appropriate three-word phrase that is printable here. 

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.

After five minutes, fans begin to stream in and are given a huge, noisy standing ovation by Leicester City supporters who understand the seriousness of the cause. You don’t get many moments like these in football – and it would be far healthier if it had not been needed – but it is genuinely touching to witness.

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

Two hours earlier, a few hundred Wednesday supporters milled around Leicester City’s King Power Stadium, sitting on the grass banks next to the roundabout or having conversations in small groups with lunchtime burgers in hand. They have come here deliberately early so that they can walk to their seats deliberately late.

Members 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.”

Dark humour is always the last thing to go. At the other end of the King Power, as the team coaches arrive, another group of Wednesday fans gather. As the players exit the bus, one wag shouts out in a thick South Yorkshire accent: “Don’t worry lads, we’ve got a team.”

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.

I began my 2024-25 domestic season with Sheffield Wednesday, a 4-0 home win on an impossible lovely Sunday afternoon when the blue of sky and Hillsborough seats seemed to merge as one, as if for two hours the whole world was Wednesday.

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.

Then, Wednesday were top of the league, which even a single game into a campaign comes with an involuntary flutter. Then the air was heady with hope. Then Danny Rohl was the manager. Then the squad looked ready to possibly, maybe, who knows, kick on.

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.

Dreams are on hold until goodness knows when, because Dejphon Chansiri is still the owner. For all that has changed in a year, opening weekend to opening weekend, the owner is still the owner. Everything else is subservient to the implications of that fact.

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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.

Players and staff have been paid late in four of the last five months, to the extent that they had been permitted to hand in their notice to leave. Rohl has left, a horribly messy and extended departure that bent and broke a special relationship. The club has a paid transfer or loan embargo that has been extended to winter 2027. The North Stand is due to be empty next weekend due to concerns over its structural integrity.

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.

That is one of the unforgivables here. Summer is supposed to be a time of dual purpose for football supporters, escape and recharge followed by intrigue and anticipation. Wednesday fans are none from four: escape is impossible when the new stream is so important and so debilitating; how can anyone anticipate anything other but the worst? They have been battered into submission.

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.

“It just takes up so much oxygen,” he says.

“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 don’t think I can honestly give you a real genuine answer of how much it’s impacted me because we are still going through it. Maybe 12 months down the line, if we’ve got a new owner, I can say to you: ‘wow, my life was ruled by this for four or five months’.”

“I think the overriding emotion used to be anger,” Mappin says.

“Now it’s sadness, seeing how much it’s affecting people. It really gets to me emotionally because you never think that it’s going to be you or the supporters around you.

“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.”

If denial has been rife among supporters, they are not the only ones. Chansiri, who took over with aspirations of Premier League football and a fanbase singing his name (which, to be fair, they did on Sunday – just not how he imagined it), is still here because he has chosen not to accept any bid for the club.

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.

On Wednesday, the EFL released a statement in which it became clear that they have serious concerns about Chansiri’s ability to fund the club and thus that an expedited sale is in the best interests of all parties. They have a responsibility to ensure fair competition. Transfer embargoes may seem like kicking a club when it is down, but if current staff are not being paid you cannot be allowed to register others. That seems appropriate.

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.

The truth remains: Wednesday have arrived at their nightmare scenario: the owner appears incapable of funding the club in a satisfactory manner while simultaneously being unwilling to sell it at a price that no sensible buyer would agree to. All the while, more bridges are burned, more supporters are alienated, more money is owed and a social institution takes more steps closer to the cliff edge.

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.

Before the game, I ask Johnson why he has travelled here, despite the mental strain and the inescapable reality of this season.

“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.

“Whatever else is going on, they deserve to hear unabridged, uninterrupted support for them and opposition against the owner for 85 minutes. They need the backing. I want to be able to say that, as a fan, I was there when they needed us.”

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.

They harry Leicester players in possession and force turnovers. Barry Bannan, the hero of the hour after his new contract, plays a quarterback role where he pings lofted passes left, right and centre. Nathaniel Chalobah scores his first league goal since March 2021 and the away end thrashes around in pure disbelief.

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.

The lack of pre-season fixtures punishes you down the line with a lack of physical preparation that a squad this thin cannot afford. This is one game of at least 48 and, even midway during the second half, Wednesday’s players looked shattered. Leicester’s two goals were both scored by central defenders after wretched marking, a reminder that pre-season is when you reiterate your tactical work too.

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.

There will be many more defeats. For a while, draws will feel like wins and narrow losses to clubs with owners who seem capable of building a plan will pass by without a flicker of surprise. This season will be miserable; it has to be.

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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The other is experienced only by the supporters: the law of diminished expectations. This summer, they have seen Championship clubs lay out their vision for how they will achieve their goals over the next three years. This year they have seen EFL clubs that needed takeovers get them and heard new owners discuss recovery plans.

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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