Sheffield Wednesday's Harry Amass agreement with Man Utd shows the mess Dejphon Chansiri is in | OneFootball

Sheffield Wednesday needed more than one arrival on deadline day, but even the loan of Harry Amass demonstrated the mess they're in at the moment.

Transfer deadline day was particularly frantic this summer, but Sheffield Wednesday largely missed out, and even the one signing they did manage spoke volumes for the current mismanagement of the club.

Already in the relegation places at the bottom of the Championship and with a threadbare squad, the end of the summer transfer window might have given Sheffield Wednesday an opportunity to undo some of the damage that's been done to the club over the course of 2025.

But in the end, almost nothing happened. Only one new player turned up at Hillsborough on transfer deadline day. 18-year-old midfielder Harry Amass has signed until January on loan from Manchester United, and even getting this one signing over the line told the story of how difficult things have become for the club in recent weeks.

Two further attempts to loan players fell flat. Neither Jaden Heskey nor Zépiqueno Redmond, who the club had attempted to bring in from Manchester City and Aston Villa respectively, ended up at Hillsborough. And the fact that Amass did end up going there is only because Manchester United took the somewhat rare step of agreeing to cover his full wages for the duration of the loan.

Sheffield Wednesday remain under an extremely strict fee restriction

It is uncommon for parent clubs to bear the full cost of a player's full wages during a loan period. The parent club are contractually responsible for ensuring the player receives their full wage, but ordinarily the club taking the player on will pay at least a proportion of this cost.

This isn't possible for Sheffield Wednesday at the moment. They are under a fee restriction as a result of previous failures to pay their wages on time (downgraded from a full transfer embargo earlier this month after they used their solidarity money to bring everything they owed up to date), meaning that any transfer decision they made had to be run through the EFL Club Financial Reporting Unit (CFRU).

And the CFRU's response to all of this has been the toughest stance they can take. No players would be allowed to join the club unless the parent club was to carry the full financial burden of such an agreement. In the case of Jaden Heskey and Zépiqueno Redmond, no agreement could be reached.

It could be that the clubs involved didn't want to pay the full amount themselves, and it should be added that they're fully within their rights to not want to. It could be that either the players concerned or the club felt that Sheffield Wednesday might not be a healthy environment for a young player to be dropped into. Whatever the reason, those deals didn't go through to completion.

The Harry Amass loan has seen both player and parent club make allowances for Sheffield Wednesday

But the transfer of Harry Amass was different. The Sheffield Star has detailed how chaotic Wednesday's transfer deadline day was in practice, and what is really striking about the details regarding the loan of Amass is the extent to which the player wanted to join the club.

"Here you have a teenager, a youngster tipped as a future England international, who waited from 9am through to about 6.59pm to understand his own immediate future," they wrote. "A player who rejected moves elsewhere because Hillsborough felt like the right place to be." Adding that: "Amass has actively chosen to earn less money, to give up potential bonuses, because he wanted to come and join this fight. That’s the sort of kid that Wednesday need in their corner. He’s on board for the scrap."

Sheffield Wednesday needed both Manchester United and the player on board for this, though, and United evidently made a decision that the cost of getting Amass game time at Hillsborough was one worth paying. Capology estimates his wages to be £5,000-a-week. With 17 weeks left of the year, this means that United will be paying around £85,000 to cover his full wages until the end of the loan in January.

Nothing that this says about the current state of Sheffield Wednesday is positive. The EFL blocked any other ins and outs because they have so little faith that Wednesday will be able to reliably cover them. The Sheffield Star reported that: "Behind the scenes Chansiri has been told that he must provide assurances that he can continue to fund the club going forward, it’s the only way the club will be given the green light to make additions." It can only be presumed that those assurances were not received.

The club paid its wage bill on time at the end of August, but there had even been reports that this might not happen, so it must have been close. And if the CFRU have this little faith in Chansiri to underwrite this, just this fact in itself demonstrates just how precarious the club's position has become under his ownership. It's a good job for Sheffield Wednesday that the wage requirements are, relatively speaking, chicken feed for Manchester United. £85,000 is the equivalent to less than a week's wages for Andre Onana, for example.

But the fact that the player has foregone bonuses and that Manchester United have underwritten these costs speaks volumes about how dire the situation remains at Hillsborough. The arrival of one player doesn't go anywhere near fixing the problems that they face at the moment, though even this one arrival doesn't mean that they weren't fortunate to land even him. Until such a time that Chansiri either starts running Sheffield Wednesday properly again or the club is sold, there remains no end in sight to the agony of this particular club.