Administration, a crumbling ground and -4 points: Sheffield Wednesday fans have not felt this excited in years | OneFootball

It is fair to say things haven’t gone swimmingly since I last visited Hillsborough in the spring of 2023. Sheffield Wednesday were top of League One back then, on a 22-game unbeaten run under Darren Moore, the best form of any side in the country. There was tangible excitement, and promotion to the Championship followed that summer. Then came a downward spiral: Wednesday went through three managers, stopped paying players and staff, closed a crumbling North Stand and were plunged into administration.

The club are now bottom of the Championship with -4 points and more deductions likely. They have barely a dozen senior players and some kids filling in, who keep getting injured under the strain of playing professional football twice a week. The stadium is decaying, having barely been touched since its redevelopment before Euro 1996. A much-needed new training complex is a distant dream.

And yet, there is excitement on the terraces again. The club’s despised owner, Thai tuna magnate Dejphon Chansiri, is gone, and bidders are lining up to take on the project. A mystery donor has lent the club £1m to get back on its feet. The EFL has allowed a couple of free signings and Liam Cooper, the former Leeds United captain, has joined Henrik Pedersen’s side.

Owls fans have flocked back to their tired old sanctuary, wanting to feel something again.

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Fans queue outside the ground the day after the club entered administration (Getty Images)

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Young Sheffield Wednesday fans celebrate the departure of owner Dejphon Chansiri (Getty Images)

“We must be one of the first teams ever to celebrate administration,” says Tom Scott of the Sheffield Wednesday Supporters’ Trust. “The last six or seven years have been pretty desperate. He [Chansiri] was embarrassing us quite regularly with strange statements and odd decisions – losing Darren Moore was a good example … It became a proper chore to drag yourself to the ground and sit among protests and bad atmospheres and bad performances. It got pretty heavy.”

Negativity would be understandable on both sides of Sunday’s derby match when Sheffield United visit Hillsborough. Two grand old clubs in a passionate sporting city are languishing in the Championship’s relegation zone, and they meet like a couple of haggard prize fighters well past their best. “I think it will be quite a poor game of football,” Scott laughs.

Yet Hillsborough will be bouncing. An expected 33,000 fans will turn out on a freezing afternoon with nothing but local pride on the line, and despite the game being shown live on ITV. “Hey ho Sheffield Wednesday” will reverberate around the ground before kick-off. And this is really what the next owner is buying – not lucrative assets or a gleaming stadium or high-value players, but a 150-year-old cultural institution that matters to its people.

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Wednesday manager Henrik Pedersen says he is determined to stabilise the club (Getty Images)

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Fans have returned to fill Hillsborough in recent weeks (Getty Images)

That was not how Chansiri saw the club. When I spoke to fans two years ago there was a sense that perhaps he deserved a little credit, for spending plenty of his own money, for learning to stop making wild public statements, such as his ill-judged interview with the Sheffield Star a few years ago in which he told supporters to rustle up £2m themselves to cover debts and wages or risk losing the club.

By the end he had disappeared entirely from public view. While fans worried about whether their club would survive, Chansiri went into hiding and the last they heard from him was a statement on the club’s website in July. The Independent tried to contact him for this article, via his tuna company, but did not receive a response.

He was still in contact with staff at the club in the dying days, but they were at the end of their tether. They suffered missed or delayed pay in five months out of seven, and several employees had to defer mortgage payments. As one staff member told me, it felt like the club was already in a state of administration in the months before Chansiri left and the situation simply couldn’t go on any longer.

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Dejphon Chansiri, the outspoken former owner of Sheffield Wednesday (Getty Images)

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Fans protest against owner Chansiri in the days before his exit (Getty)

How do supporters reflect on Chansiri’s reign now? “It was a total waste of time – his time, his money, and our time and money as well,” says Scott. “By the end it had gotten a bit silly, there was just nothing positive happening.

“A couple of years ago there was still quite a lot of goodwill towards him for that initial spending spree, I suppose. People could see that he’d tried and he talked a good game. But certainly after [2023], it all massively unraveled and it became clear that he really didn’t know what he was doing, or particularly care about what he was doing.”

Wednesday fans can take plenty of credit for forcing him out, strangling him of funds by staying away from games and not buying merchandise. And they can take all the credit for lifting the club off its knees, just as they promised they would. Administrators issued a call to arms and fans bought club memberships in droves to fill the coffers. Supporters raised £10,000 in an hour to pay for the team’s hotel for December’s away trip to Blackburn. The Trust raised another £70,000 in only two days. In the month since administration, millions of pounds have been poured back into the club.

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Supporters have been spending in the club shop to help boost the club's finances (Getty Images)

The fractured relationship between club and supporters is slowly being repaired. “We designed a badge that has a Trust logo and then around the side it says, ‘Paid for by the fans, for the club’,” Scott adds. “The club are putting that on the shorts of the players. That wouldn’t have happened a few weeks ago [under Chansiri’s rule].”

Most football fans don’t demand much. Certainly, Wednesday fans do not have high expectations of European football every week; there are no delusions of grandeur at Hillsborough. They want reasonably-priced tickets and a decent pint and a team who care. They’d like a well-run club where the people in charge listen to fans now and again. But perhaps all any football fan really wants is a bit of hope.

“It’s surely our turn for at least some good to come,” Scott says. “Every club around us seems to have had at least a period of nice ownership and sustained fun on the pitch. After 25 years outside the top flight, maybe it’s our turn for some fun.”