Why James Bord could face issue with completing Sheffield Wednesday takeover | OneFootball

He may have been picked as the preferred bidder for Sheffield Wednesday, but James Bord still has one hurdle to clear with the governing bodies.

James Bord may have been selected by Sheffield Wednesday's administrators as the preferred bidder for the club, but he still has one potentially significant hurdle to cross with the game's governing bodies.

With 18 games now having passed since their only Championship win of the season, there have been few signs that Sheffield Wednesday's 2024-25 is going to get any better.

They are, after all, now 32 points from safety at the bottom of the division and remain on a negative points tally as a result of points deductions.

But with relegation this season already looking like a foregone conclusion, the longer-term future of the club has increasingly come under the microscope since they were put into administration on the 24th October.

Begbie's Traynor, the administrators dealing with Wednesday's insolvency, confirmed that a consortium fronted by James Bord was the preferred bidder for the club shortly before Christmas, but Bord's past means that he still has one hurdle to overcome before the EFL will sign off on him taking ownership of the club.

James Bord's professional gambling connections may raise EFL questions before takeover sign-off

In their reporting of the decision to make Bord's consortium the preferred bidder for the club, the BBC's Dale Johnson confirmed one detail from Bord's past which could further protract the process of him taking ownership of Sheffield Wednesday.

He reported that, "The Bord bid still has to pass the EFL's Owners and Directors' test, which may have some hurdles to overcome due to his past involvement in gambling," confirming that, "Bord started his career working for gambling firms Starlizard and Smartodds, won $4.3m (£3.2m) on the pro poker circuit."

"Bord left Smartodds to concentrate on machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) in San Francisco," he continued, but despite having left the industry the EFL may yet have questions to ask about his connections to professional gambling as he seeks to take ownership of the troubled Championship club.

Bord may have questions to answer from the EFL about his time as a professional gambler

The EFL's guidelines on the current iteration of the Owners & Directors Test are publicly available, and they state that being "found to have committed a breach of the prohibition on betting on football in England and Wales" is a disqualifying condition for anyone seeking to take ownership of one of their member clubs.

But it should also be added that, in the current regulatory environment, the League may go further than these guidelines alone. One of the biggest reasons for the creation of an independent regulator for football was a perceived laxness over who was allowed to take control of clubs, and connections with the gambling industry are being treated with increasing caution by the game's governing bodies.

And in addition to this, Sheffield Wednesday's takeover is an extremely high-profile case. Were anything to go drastically wrong at Hillsborough over the next few years, the EFL would be opening themselves up to at the very least considerable criticism, but also potentially a further stripping of their powers over this sort of matter in the future, were they to get this decision wrong.

None of this is to suggest that James Bord has done anything illegal or improper in his past as a professional gambler. Wednesday fans with concerns over his bid for the club may be more concerned by his previous position as an advisor to Sheffield United, and as Dale Johnson points out in his piece, "Bord's consulting at Sheffield United wasn't seen as a success and there is a feeling at Bramall Lane it had an impact on a chaotic summer for the Blades, that has led to a challenging season just months after coming so close to promotion to the Premier League."

Furthermore, his bid does have aspects to it that recommend it. His offer is understood to meet the threshold at which Wednesday will not be docked a further 15 points at the start of next season, while he does have previous experience of working within the game, not only from his time at Bramall Lane, from which it is hoped that lessons will have learned, but also through his ownership of the Scottish club Dunfermline Athletic.

But with the January transfer window now open and previous reports that Wednesday could find themselves struggling financially again if the sale of the club isn't tied up by the end of the month, unless new working capital comes in, further delays are not going to help their position. Sheffield Wednesday need to get themselves under new ownership in order to start building a new future, but there remain questions that Bord will have to answer before this can all be finalised.