What Sheffield Wednesday’s administrators quietly asked the EFL before fixture release day | OneFootball

Former Sheffield Wednesday administrator Kris Wigfield has spoken about a request he made to the EFL for their fixtures in League One next season.

The former Sheffield Wednesday administrator Kris Wigfield has spoken of a request that he made to the EFL while he was responsible for the running of the club, which may impact their fixture list for next season.

At the end of a horrendous 2025-26 season, Sheffield Wednesday supporters have awoken from their nightmare. The takeover of the club by Arise Capital has been completed, and there has been confirmation from the EFL that they won't, as had been feared, be subject to a 15 point deduction in League One next season.

Work has already started on the rebuild that the club has needed for so long. Renovation work has started on Hillsborough, while season tickets have already gone on sale. Work on rebuilding the actual first-team squad itself can't formally begin until the 15th June, when the transfer window opens again, but there's so much work to do at the club this summer that everybody at Hillsborough will already be exceptionally busy.

Sheffield Wednesday are likely to be kicking off their new season away from home

There's still almost a month until the fixtures for the 2026-27 season are released by the EFL. This won't happen until noon on the 25th June. EFL Cup fixtures begin on the weekend of the 7th August, with League matches starting a week later.

But in a post made to the social media platform X on Tuesday evening, Kris Wigfield, the insolvency practitioner who was responsible for the day-to-day running of the club while they were in administration from the end of October until the start of May, has revealed that Sheffield Wednesday are likely to start the new season with an away match.

Wigfield confirmed that one of the responsibilities that he had while managing the club's affairs was to submit their fixture preferences for the new season. He said that, because the club was coming under new ownership and would have a lot of work to do, he requested an away fixture for the opening weekend.

The EFL is not bound to this by his request, but Wigfield confirmed that "it is perhaps more likely than normal." He advised that the rationale behind this decision was that, "we felt the new owners may appreciate additional time to complete all of the work required at the stadium following the takeover."

The atmosphere at Sheffield Wednesday's first match of 2026-27 will be very different to their first of 2025-26

With their 2025-26 Championship schedule having started at Leicester City, Sheffield Wednesday would be starting their new season away from home for the second time in a row should the EFL accede to Wigfield's request.

But should this happen, the atmosphere in the away end will be about as different as it's possible to be from The King Power Stadium in August 2025. At that point, the full extent of the club's desperate financial position was truly starting to reveal itself, and Wednesday fans protested against former owner Dejphon Chansiri by refusing to take their seats until five minutes of the match had been played.

Should Wednesday be at home on the opening weekend of the 2026-27 season, the atmosphere at Hillsborough will be similarly buoyant. Season tickets were put on sale a couple of weeks ago, with prices reduced from last season in order to tempt back those who had stayed away last season.

The club's moves in this respect have certainly been successful. Wednesday sold more than 10,000 in the 24 hours after they were put on sale, with new CEO David Bruce having confirmed that his aim is to more than double that number before the start of the new season.

With so much going on at the club, it's clear that Sheffield Wednesday fans have a lot to look forward to over the course of the summer. The transformation from the position in which the club found itself at the start of 2025-26 couldn't be more clear.