London – One of the world’s oldest football teams is in big problems.
When Sheffield Wednesday FC starts the new season on Sunday, in Leicester City in the championship, the second level of British football, more than 3,000 traveler fans will not take a seat to encourage their beloved team, known as the OWLS.
On the other hand, they will celebrate a five -minute protest outside the King Power Stadium of Leicester against a man: Thai businessman Dejphon Chansiri, the owner of Wednesday and the focal point of a growing crisis that can threaten his own existence.
The financial problems of the team are the increase, and the failed attempts to sell it have dominated the local sports media and the online forums for months, and the crisis has much broader implications for the health of English football away from the abrupt wealth of Liverpool and Manchester City.
The problem is so sharp that the British government has approved a new law that will launch a football regulator to monitor the purchase and sale of equipment and ensure that the owners are “in and appropriate.”
For Wednesday, founded in 1867, that could be very little, too late.
Some teams have bad discounts, but this summer has seen on Wednesday establish new levels of chaos: players and staff have not been paid in time in four of the last five months. As a result, there is a transfer embargo that prohibits the club from buying new players until January 2027, even if it could afford.
At least 15 players have gone in free transfers or for a fraction of their market value this summer, leaving just enough players to fill a game squad with 11 headlines and up to nine substitutes.
“It is becoming a soap opera,” said Dan Fudge, who is coanfrerion of the popular podcast “Wednesday.”
“Usually, as Podcasters, we are scratching the content of speaking during the summer,” said Fudge, “but it seems that we have had a new horror timeline every week to speak.”
The mishap list continues. The talented chief coach Danny Rohl, a charismatic and brain German promoted for great success in the main European leagues, left by the mutual agreement.
The famous Old Hillsborough stadium is literally falling apart: Sheffield City Council refused to grant a security license for the vast position of the north of 9,000 seats due to the concerns of discovering wiring and cracks on the terrace.
The club said in a statement this week that it was working to fix this and would seek to place the starting season ticket holders in another place if it was still closed for the first game at home on August 16. A disabled fanatic whose accessible seat is in North Stand broke this week when he told the BBC what effect the crisis is having.
The club did not respond to the request for comments from NBC News.
Chansiri says he wants to sell, but no one has fulfilled his valuation for the club, which according to football finance experts is too high. It is reported that the owner offered the club for 100 million pounds ($ 134 million). Kieran Maguire, an outstanding expert and commentator of British football finance, puts the real value of 40 million pounds ($ 53 million), but Chansiri said in June that he rejected an offer at this price of a consortium based in the United States.
Maguire said it was unlikely that on Wednesday it was completely, but said that, in any case, the team would surely be relegated to the League below and face a very difficult season.
“It is not malicious in the sense that it does not want to destroy the football club, but it is very naive, it has no knowledge of the industry,” Maguire said.
The English football culture is one of the expenses. Only this summer, the 20 Premier League teams have spent around 1.8 billion pounds ($ 2.4 billion) in transfer rates, and the reigning champion Liverpool splashed 252 million pounds ($ 335 million).
And the contrast between the upper and the rest of the pyramid soccer system is marked.
Among them, the Premier League clubs obtained more than 6 billion pounds ($ 8 billion) in revenue in the 2024-25 season, an increase of 36% compared to the previous year, according to the Deloitte consulting firm.
Meanwhile, each team of the championship, the fifth more attended the League in Europe, gave an operational loss in the same period for the second consecutive season.
There is money from television, sponsorship, sales of players and game’s revenues, but with large salary bills, clubs must trust players sales and, if they are lucky and rich benefactors, inject effective.
The English Soccer League said Wednesday that it was in “Advanced Discussions” with Chansiri’s lawyers on how it will sell their participation in the club. The League, criticized by some fans for not acting before, warned the Thai magnate that the club needed to “fulfill its obligations or fulfill its commitment to sell to a well -financed party, for fair market value.”
Could things get worse? Probably.
This week, Morecambe FC, a team in the northwest coastal city of the same name, was suspended from the National League, the fifth level of the pyramid -shaped league system in the form of a pyramid of English football, with elite clubs at the top and smaller and more parish clubs towards the lower part.
Morecambe did not comply with his financial obligations, and if a new buyer who can support him cannot be found, he could disappear forever. This happened to Macclesfield Town, Bury, Hereford and a handful of other teams whose owners could not support them and whose responsibilities were too large.
“There is a feeling of premonition about the club. We have seen that other clubs do it, and normally at the eleventh hour enters and someone enters and [stages] An acquisition, ”said Fudge.
“Then, in recent years, you look at teams like Bury and what happened recently to Morecambe, and they have not had that white gentleman, and suddenly we are thinking: ‘Oh, stay in a minute, we could be the great scalp.'”
Like many fans, Fudge has no doubt who is to blame. “Pure ineptitude is how we have here, regardless of warning signals around Chansiri since 2018”.
Fans hotly remember the 1990s, when players like Chris Waddle, David Hirst and Des Walker, all international internationals, aligned together with some of the most frequent talents in Europe, helping the club to reach seventh place in the Premier League during the 1996-97 season.
Fans were optimistic when Chansiri, a Sion of Thai Union Group, a seafood conglomerate that has the Chicken of the Sea can be in the United States, assumed the position of 2015. He promised and delivered some success, taking the team to the final of the playoffs of the 2016 championship, just 90 minutes back to the main league.
All this feels like a long time ago, with fans wondering what way the new football regulator will take and if it makes any difference.
David Blunkett, a main minister during the Tony Blair government in the 1990s and 2000s and now a member of the House of Lords, is a fan of Wednesday of a lifetime and attended an online meeting with the Football League on Thursday. He said it was “vital” that Wednesday’s crisis is addressed before the regulator is established.
“The parliamentarians, including those who represent the city, the confidence of the followers and other fans, will continue to press for an immediate resolution of the crisis in Hillsborough,” News told NBC.
Coming on the north side of Sheffield in South Yorkshire, a city famous for its steel, it became an early member of the Football Association (the term “football” is an abbreviation for “association”), since football madness extended through working class communities throughout the north and Midlands.
The team obtained its unique Cricket name: in the mid -nineteenth century, there were multiple teams in Sheffield playing this game, and the one who played on Wednesdays began a football team. The name stayed.
On Sunday, fans will raise banners and shout slogans in an attempt to preserve that story. Even if some prefer to see the game.
“There are many people who are in the ‘we protest, let’s send this message as much as we can’, so I completely agree, but it is not everyone’s bag, because many people use football to spend time with their family and friends,” said Fudge.
Despite the agitation at the club, Wednesday depleted its assignment of 3,287 tickets to go for Sunday’s game. It is not clear immediately how many more on Wednesday there will be.
