Sheffield Wednesday takeover: How Mike Ashley and John Textor's wealth compares to Dejphon Chansiri | OneFootball

Mike Ashley and John Textor are now being linked with a takeover of Sheffield Wednesday. Here's how much they're worth compared to Dejphon Chansiri.

Mike Ashley and John Textor's names have been linked with a move for Sheffield Wednesday, leading to comparisons being made between their worth and Dejphon Chansiri.

Sheffield Wednesday remain in deep trouble. Second from bottom in the Championship, and having failed to pay their wages on time for the fifth time in seven months at the end of October, the club continues to lurch from crisis to crisis, with an escalation of fan protests due for their next home league match against Middlesbrough.

But all hope is not yet lost. Posting to the social media platform X earlier this week, the journalist Alan Biggs commented that there is still interest in buying the club, not only from John Textor - whose potential interest in buying Wednesday has been known about for several months - but also, potentially, from Mike Ashley, the former owner of Newcastle United.

Wednesday need a buyer, and they need one as soon as possible. There is a lot of work to be done at Hillsborough, and it has become clear that owner Dejphon Chansiri is either not in a position to be able to or doesn't want to fund the club's financial losses. So with all of this in mind, here's how the fortunes amassed by Textor and Ashley stack up against that of the Chansiri family.

John Textor

It should be pointed out before going any further that estimates of the net worth of wealthy individuals can vary enormously. This is certainly true in the case of John Textor.

Textor made his impression in business as a "disruptor" in a variety of different areas, but he's become best known for his multi-club portfolio which includes the Brazilian giants Botafogo. Formerly a part-owner of Premier League club Crystal Palace, he sold his share in the summer for a reported £190 million.

As of June 2025, his net worth value was being described as anything from "the range of $75 million to $100 million" to £3.4 billion. How much somebody is worth ultimately comes down to how the calculation is being made, and it's very clear from the two articles linked - both of which were published in the same month - that very different forms of calculations were being used for them.

Mike Ashley

The former Newcastle owner, Mike Ashley, has also had a football-related windfall recently, as the former owner of the Coventry City stadium, the CBS Arena, which was sold to the club's owner Doug King in September. There is no indication of what King paid to reunite the club with its former home, but Ashley was reported to have paid £17 million for it in 2022.

On the matter of his net worth, what matters is what's being calculated. But according to the 2025 Sunday Times Rich List, Ashley's net worth was estimated at £3.12 billion. This was a huge fall on the year before, when the same source estimated it at £3.8 billion. This annual fall of £679 million has been reported as the largest year-on-year fall in the 37-year history of the list.

It's reasonable to assume that these multi-billion estimations both take into account all assets owned by Textor and Ashley, meaning that they're reasonable to use as side-by-side valuations of the values of the two businessmen.

Dejphon Chansiri's value is linked to the value of his family and his share holdings

Estimating the net worth of Dejphon Chansiri is even more difficult, because his financial position is closely related to the position of his family. A 2020 Forbes report estimated him as being worth $575 million, but that was more than five years ago and, again, the calculation used to work out that amount is somewhat opaque.

A lot has changed since 2020, and it has been speculated that Wednesday's current woes could be tied to the plummeting shareholding of the family business, the Thai Union Group. Chansiri holds 40,000,000 shares in the Thai Union Group, and their stock has halved in value since be bought Sheffield Wednesday in 2015.

It should also be added that buying a football club isn't a matter of pulling out a cheque book and writing one for the amount of money that the seller wants for it. Such a sale would almost certainly be financed through an outside financial institution, and it was reported in August that John Textor had teamed up with football financier Keith Harris, but although Textor in known to have had conversations with Chansiri, he recently described the extent of his involvement as being "a bit overstated."

It is natural and inevitable that names will be thrown around when a club the size of Wednesday could be set to be sold, but at present there remain few signs that anything will be moving on soon. But with the chair of the incoming football regulator, David Kogan, having told the BBC that the new watchdogs will have the power to force owners to sell clubs "as an act of last resort" and that Wednesday's current problems are a "significant problem", the point could soon be arriving at which Chansiri is left with little option but to accept the best offer he can get for the club.