What Sheffield Wednesday supporters once chanted about Derby County – This has aged badly | OneFootball

Sheffield Wednesday supporters' mocking of Derby County a few years ago has aged very badly.

Sheffield Wednesday are in the mire at the moment, with off-field problems causing plenty of issues to seep onto the pitch as the Owls near the beginning of the 2025/26 Championship campaign.

Over this summer, Sheffield Wednesday have been placed under a three-window transfer embargo, meaning that they can not pay transfer fees for players until January 2027.

As well as that, they have had players such as Josh Windass and Michael Smith opt to terminate their contracts as a result of wage payments being delayed. Those players have moved to Championship rivals Wrexham and Preston North End respectively.

Danny Rohl had been touted around for many jobs, but eventually had to return late to pre-season training for supposed ‘clear the air talks’ with his squad.

The 34-year-old German has now since departed instead via mutual consent last week, leaving his former assistant coach Henrik Pedersen to take the reins at Hillsborough.

As further issues mount, with Dejphon Chansiri yet to sell the club and seemingly unwilling to engage in anything constructive, the club has to now be seen in a perilous state.

It will be heart-breaking for Wednesday supporters, as well as for most neutrals, but quite a few Derby County supporters may reflect on the situation in a slightly different way.

Some Wednesday supporters mocked Derby’s previous financial situation

During the financial turmoil suffered by Derby County a few years ago, some Sheffield Wednesday supporters were keen to mock Rams’ supporters and their rival club.

Away supporters arriving for the clash between the two sides at Pride Park were heard chanting: “We’re having a party when Derby County dies.”

Derby eventually suffered relegation to League One in 2022, but finally managed to stabilise their finances off the pitch and have since kicked on and back into the Championship, where they survived on the final day of last year.

It was, of course, a small percentage of Sheffield Wednesday supporters that opted to mock and humiliate Derby at the time, rather than show sympathy and solitude, but it has certainly aged extremely badly for the club and the fanbase given the position they now find themselves in at Hillsborough.

Sheffield Wednesday supporters fell foul of footballing tribalism - they now face their own peril

Social issues are often only ever solved when the people who tend to be arguing against each other realise that they are generally on the same side of the argument in the bigger picture.

That is best distilled in sporting fandom and especially with the developed aggression and hostility of tribalism within football, particularly within England.

As ticket prices continue to rise and football clubs continue to struggle to exist, as was the case with Bury in 2019 and may well be the case for Morecambe in 2025, football supporters, particularly rival fans, often sit back and laugh, feeling as though it will never and can never happen to them and their club.

That chant is an example of that: some Wednesday supporters so blinded by the idea that you must hate every other team that there is no pause for thought that they are falling foul of simple divide and conquer techniques.

So long as football supporters continue to bicker, or maybe defend their own club’s ridiculous ticket pricing, for example, purely because it is their club at the expense of themselves further down the line, situations like Wednesday, or Morecambe, are going to continue to occur.