There is no primrose path to glory when fans become the owners of a football club. The past decade offers ample evidence of that.
The Supporters Trust board at Wrexham were coming under heavy fire as results failed to match public expectations when Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds came along. Portsmouth and Brentford had also concluded that long-term competitiveness ultimately required private investment when their trusts sold to those with serious money.
But after a club has been annexed and run into the ground by one of that dismal cadre of owners who are in it to asset strip or bask in their own vast egos, there can be no better custodians than its very own fans. Those with an understanding of the soul of the club, easing it off life support and stabilising it: that was certainly the story at Wrexham and Portsmouth.
No club in Britain currently requires that kind of care quite so much as Sheffield Wednesday. Supporters who thought that the wretched tenure of Dejphon Chansiri might be the end of the nightmare were mistaken.
Next, they were subjected to James Bord, whose consortium paid down £4million to be a bidder but seemingly saw that the source of some of their own funds – gambling and crypto-gambling – made them unlikely to pass the EFL’s Owners’ and Directors’ test (ODT) and so pulled out; perhaps jumping before they were pushed.
Now Wednesday’s administrators have American businessman David Storch as the new named preferred bidder – though there are serious doubts about whether his AAR Corporation will pass the ODT, either.
No club in Britain currently requires care quite so much as Sheffield Wednesday
Supporters who thought that the wretched tenure of Dejphon Chansiri might be the end of the nightmare were mistaken
Storch must provide a convincing explanation to the EFL of the $55million (£41.5m) that AAR Corp paid in 2024 to settle investigations by the US Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission, after executives pleaded guilty to bribing government officials in Nepal and South Africa when selling $24m (£18.1m) worth of aircraft and component parts to them.
The EFL are going to be particularly risk-averse here, as they do not want to grant him an ownership which the new Independent Football Regulator (IFR) immediately overturns when it re-assesses the decision as part of its licensing system for all clubs. It would be no surprise whatsoever if the EFL reject Storch.
Of the known bidders for Wednesday, that would leave only Mike Ashley – waiting in the wings with a dirt-cheap bid which, just like Storch’s, would surely be too low to prevent the club beginning next season with a 15-point deduction.
With that controversialist, cut-price approach to football which made him a reviled figure for many at Newcastle United, Ashley is the last man you would want at the centre of a club in Wednesday’s predicament.
The future would look very different with Wednesday’s Supporters Trust – an organisation which has intelligently advocated for better management throughout the Chansiri debacle – at the helm.
The Trust have not indicated that they would be interested in buying the club themselves, should all other viable bids fail. When I asked them, last week, if they were considering such a move, they told me: ‘Our focus is firmly on the ongoing administration process and ensuring that the club secures a suitable new owner as quickly as possible. We expect the administrators to identify and move forward with a preferred bidder soon.’
But broadcaster and former Crystal Palace owner Simon Jordan, part of a consortium which pulled out of the running to buy Wednesday, said last week that he thinks the value of the club is less than £20m – a figure which, given the size of the fanbase, arguably the biggest outside the Premier League, would appear to be within the Supporters Trust’s reach.
With such an organisation at the reins – rather than a rapacious money-maker like Ashley – it seems possible that the EFL could use their discretion not to impose a looming 15-point penalty on Wednesday, for a failure to ensure the unsecured creditors from the Chansiri era are paid at least 25 per cent of what they are owed.
With that controversialist, cut-price approach to football which made him a reviled figure at Newcastle United, Mike Ashley is the last man you would want at Wednesday
Wednesday are one of the great British football clubs, with a tradition, a name and a fanbase which, though it seems hard to see it now, can take them back to the top
But even if Wednesday begin the next League One season with the points deduction, and find themselves relegated to League Two, it does not require much imagination to see that by starting again at the bottom, they could become a club reborn: resurgent and dominant in the fourth tier, with Hillsborough packed out again and the blue half of the Steel City getting behind its own people as they manage the rebuild.
In Jordan’s discussion of the club, he observed that it may take four or five years to recover Wednesday from the pit that Chansiri has left them in. But that within two years, he suggested, the club’s next owners could be in position to find new investment and spread the ownership base – in the same way that Wrexham’s owners have done, by selling part-shares to the New York-based Allyn family and private equity firm Apollo.
‘What you do is have it for a couple of years, do the hard yards and get it into good shape – and then you spread it out, like Wrexham have done,’ Jordan said. ‘Maybe that’s what you do with Sheffield Wednesday.’
Wednesday are one of the great British football clubs, with a tradition, a name and a fanbase which, though it seems hard to see it now, make them extremely capable of making their way back to the top.
The absence of credible takers creates an opening for those who are most innately attuned to what a journey from darkness to light really needs to look and feel like. Some journey and story it could be.
