'We have to stop listening to Sheffield United fans' - Sheffield Wednesday, James Bord takeover factor debated | OneFootball

The prospective new Sheffield Wednesday owner James Bord may bring data-driven recruitment to the club, and FLW's Owls fan pundit is enthusiastic.

This article is part of Football League World's 'Terrace Talk' series, which provides personal opinions from our FLW Fan Pundits regarding the latest breaking news, teams, players, managers, potential signings and more…

Sheffield Wednesday are continuing to inch their way towards the takeover which will rescue the club.

The decision to make a consortium led by the former professional gambler James Bord as the preferred bidder was announced on Christmas Eve, and the process is now slowly wending its way through the regulatory requirements needed to finalise the deal.

But one controversy over Bord's involvement at Hillsborough is his previous involvement as a consultant across the city at Sheffield United. Brought in by the club's owners to advise on their transfer policy and under Bord's oversight, the club followed an AI-driven methodology over the summer, but it's reasonable to suggest that this didn't work.

Chris Wilder was sacked and replaced by Ruben Selles, while a raft of new players arrived at Bramall Lane over the course of the summer. But when the season started, it was disastrous for the Blades, who lost their first six games of the season and sacked Selles in the middle of September, bringing Wilder back to oversee a partial revival which has hauled them up to 15th place in the Championship.

"Things have to be done differently" - Sheffield Wednesday backed over potential pivot to AI

Football League World have spoken to our Sheffield Wednesday fan pundit Patrick McKenna on the subject of an AI-driven model being applied to transfers at Hillsborough, and Patrick feels that there's an element of gamble to all transfers: "It seems that they are the fall guy for Sheffield United's poor start to the season. With this form of transfer, yes, things may not work. There may be some signings that do, but let's be honest, we have tried the traditional route for years and we have made some very poor signings and wasted good money on players who aren't good enough through traditional scouting methods."

Patrick feels that Bord's model may be slightly misrepresented and is more sophisticated than many understand: "The traditional methods really haven't brought much success for us, so we need to be looking at adapting our transfer policy and adding facets like data and AI for new signings isn't a case of putting a name into Co-Pilot and simply choosing a player. Data forms part of the transfer policy and we may as well embrace this."

And he urges Wednesday fans to stop listening to Sheffield United fans who've been warning about the pitfalls of Bord's methods: "I think we have to stop listening to Sheffield United fans, which I would always take as a golden rule for Wednesday fans, and not particularly write off this method based on the fact that a few of their signings who weren't chosen by James Bord didn't work out for them."

Ultimately, Patrick believes that the failure of Sheffield Wednesday's transfer policies in recent years justifies taking a chance on a different way of doing their transfer business: "I'm not going to dismiss this method before we try it, and as a club, things have to be done differently. So we'll see how this works, and hopefully it will bring some success to our transfer policy, which has let us down for years."

Bord success at Sheffield Wednesday may come down to what he's learned from his experience at Sheffield United

There's a degree of unanimity among Sheffield United supporters that James Bord's spell as a consultant to their club was a failure. The decision to sack Chris Wilder and replace him with Ruben Selles was his, and his swift departure and the return of Wilder was something of an embarrassment for the club.

The new signings brought in after Selles' arrival have certainly been far from successful. Of all the players brought in, only Japhet Tanganga has convinced, while Ben Godfrey and Louie Barry's loans have already been terminated and there have been murmurs that defender Nils Zatterstrom could be sent out on loan this month, just six months after his £2.8 million signing from the Swedish club Malmo.

But it is also true to say that there may be more to Bord's methods than "putting a name into Co-Pilot." Bord has previously worked with both Tony Bloom, the owner of Brighton & Hove Albion, and Matthew Benham, the owner of Brentford, and their clubs have been held up as being the gold standard for player recruitment for medium-sized clubs in recent years.

How successful the application of such methods might be at Sheffield Wednesday is a question that can only be answered in the fullness of time. Sheffield Wednesday's transfer policy, to the extent that it had one throughout 2025, has been emergency loan signings and free agents, but only with the express permission of the EFL on account of their precarious financial position. And it's certainly reasonable to say that just about anything would surely be better than that.

And perhaps the ultimate question that will come to determine Bord's ownership of Sheffield Wednesday will be how adaptable he is, how strictly he adheres to his algorithms, what he learned from his experience at Sheffield United, and how open he is to other methods, should there be signs that Wednesday's transfer policy is heading in the same direction that it did last year. If it works, there could be significant benefits, but that "if" is doing some heavy lifting, if what happened at Bramall Lane last summer is anything to go by.