A look at prospective Sheffield Wednesday owner James Bord's fascinating CV | OneFootball

The preferred bidder for Sheffield Wednesday has a complicated background, taking in a number of different areas both in and out of the game.

The preferred bidder for Sheffield Wednesday has a colourful background, which has already seen him work with the owners of two Premier League clubs.

For Sheffield Wednesday, on the pitch at least, the new year has begun very much as the previous one ended. Two successive 3-0 defeats against Preston North End and Queens Park Rangers have left them marooned at the foot of the Championship table on -7 points, a massive 32 points from safety.

In the background, though, movement towards a takeover will be revving up in the new year. The club has been in administration since the 24th October, but it took until the middle of December for a decision over the preferred bidder to take them forward to be made.

A consortium led by James Bord ended up as the winners of the race to buy Sheffield Wednesday, and Bord has something of a history, which takes in business, professional gambling, and involvement with other football clubs. So here's a bit of background on where he came from, and how this has led him to the point of buying this historic club.

James Bord worked with two future Premier League club owners in the professional gambling sphere

Born in London and brought up as a supporter of Tottenham Hotspur, James Bord's first career came in finance, working in banking for Citigroup PLC.

Bord left that industry when he was in mid-20s, moving into professional gambling. This brought him into contact with professional football for the first time. In the mid-to-late 2000s, he worked with the Brighton & Hove Albion owner Tony Bloom, for his gambling syndicate and advisory firm, StarLizard.

He is then understood to have left to work for another sports betting fund, Smartodds, which was operated by Matthew Benham, who had also previously worked for Bloom before a falling-out, and who would go on to become the owner of another Premier League club, Brentford.

In 2010, he won the World Series of Poker Europe (WSOPE) main event for $1,313,611, becoming the first British champion of the tournament. At the time, he also ran a training and staking company for players, known as The Poker Farm. It's been estimated that he won more than $4.3 million (just under £3.2 million) from playing poker professionally.

Bord would later pivot to sports analytics and into professional football

Bord's next career pivot would take him into sporting analytics, and in particular the application of Artificial Intelligence. His data science business, Short Circuit Science describes itself as being ‘at the forefront of sports analytics, harnessing the power of AI and computer vision to delve deep into the world of sports’. This work includes player analysis that feeds into training programmes, scouting and player development.

His interest in football led him to start investing in the professional game, and his first involvements came outside the UK, as part of a group of US-based investors who purchased a 37 percent stake in Spanish second-tier team Cordoba in September 2024 and who then bought a 25 percent share in the Bulgarian side Septemvri Sofia.

Bord's next move within the football industry came with his group's acquisition of the Scottish Championship club Dunfermline Athletic in January 2025. Along with another Las Vegas-based businessman, Evan Sofer, his business vehicle Park Bench SFC LLC bought the club, who ended the 2024-25 season in 7th place in the table.

But it's for his involvement at Sheffield United that Bord is best known in English football circles. The Blades were bought by COH Sports in January 2025 and Bord was brought in as a consultant, with the aim of employing an AI-driven recruitment process.

It's reasonable to say that the summer was not a success for Sheffield United. Chris Wilder was sacked as manager at the end of the season after the team lost the Championship play-off to Sunderland and replaced by Ruben Selles, but Selles' spell running the team was an unmitigated disaster and he was sacked in the middle of September, with his team having already lost their first five games of the new season. Wilder returned to steady the ship and has since led them clear of the relegation zone.

In October 2025, the Sheffield United CEO Stephen Bettis explained Bord's role at the club to BBC Sheffield's Football Heaven podcast. He explained that, "James has a data and AI model around identifying talent that we think is maybe slightly different to anybody else but still along the same lines."

Bettis continued: "He heavily influenced some of the young, emerging talent we signed and the owners were willing to take that risk on the basis that they were relatively small transfer fees and contracts. We've done four, potentially five, and probably if one of them works, we're in front from a financial perspective. With the 'normal' recruitment, it's an additional help. We identify a number of players in each position, we send them to James and his team to run them through their AI and data machines to assist in the process. It's a kind of sense-check."

On current performances, the three other clubs are having a mixed 2025-26 season, Dunfermline are well-placed in the Scottish Championship, in 5th place in the table and just two points short of a play-off spot. CF Cordoba, meanwhile, are mid-table in Spain's Segunda Division, but Setpemvri Sofia are one place off the bottom of the Bulgarian First League, having finished the 2024-25 season in 11th place in the 16-team league.

With a mixed record as a result of his involvement in professional football and a background in poker, Sheffield Wednesday fans will be praying that Bord doesn't want to gamble further with their club, and that if he does, it doesn't result in what happened just up the road at Bramall Lane last summer and throughout the first few weeks of the 2025-26 season.