Sheffield Wednesday takeover: Why Dejphon Chansiri is still sensationally pulling the strings at Hillsborough | OneFootball

The soon-to-be former owner of the troubled Championship club remains one of the key players in their administration, and he could yet sink Wednesday.

Dejphon Chansiri has not been involved in the running of Sheffield Wednesday since the end of October, yet he remains a crucial player in the future of the troubled Championship club.

If there's one thing that Sheffield Wednesday fans have learned throughout the opening months of 2026, it's that digging a football club out of administration is seldom a straightforward process.

Wednesday supporters had, throughout the first half this season, got used to things going badly wrong on the pitch. But since the turn of the year, the extent of the hole in which the club finds itself trapped has become increasingly evident, with one takeover bid to buy the club having already failed and a second now reportedly heading towards issues of its own.

For fans of the club, who just want a return to something approaching normality at Hillsborough, 2025-26 has become a waking nightmare, and the latest signs are that things could yet get even worse than they've already become.

Insolvency law and EFL rules are hampering Sheffield Wednesday sale

A lengthy article on the BBC website has outlined exactly why Sheffield Wednesday remain in such a precarious position, and part of the reason for this is that Dejphon Chansiri still casts "a heavy shadow" over the club.

Chansiri is, they explain, the club's biggest unsecured creditor by a long way. He is owed £63.1 million out of the total of £69.6 million that is owed to unsecured creditors, and this gives him huge sway over what happens next in the administration process.

When a football club enters into administration, a rescue package called a Company Voluntary Arrangement (CVA) will be put to unsecured creditors which they can either approve or reject. Votes are weighted according to how much is owed, meaning that, in the case of Sheffield Wednesday, Chansiri holds the casting vote over whether the CVA is agreed, meaning that the club can exit administration under new ownership.

This would be a risky enough position for clubs in administration to find themselves, but EFL rules only compound these risks by requiring any agreements to pay a minimum dividend of 25p in the pound - 25% of what they're owed, to put it another way - or face a further 15-point deduction for the following season.

And it's not just about the 15-point deduction, either. The BBC also report: "Wednesday cannot pay any kind of transfer fees until the summer of 2027 after sanctions enforced under Chansiri's control" and that the League have "proposed a total salary ceiling of £7m, with individual player wages capped at £7,000-a-week." They add that this would be less than half the annual wage bill, the last time that the club were in League One.

Football clubs and insolvency processes have long been unhappy bedfellows

A big part of the reason why football clubs and the administration process can often seem incompatible with each other is that football clubs are not like most other businesses. There are few other areas of the employment market in which almost all turnover is spent on the wages of a small number of staff members who are ultimately also the club's 'product.'

The hands of the insolvency practitioners involved are tied by legal considerations. Begbies Traynor, the insolvency specialists dealing with the sale of the club, are required by law to prioritise the best interests of creditors, and in the case of Sheffield Wednesday that means Dejphon Chansiri, since so much of the club's overspending of a decade or so ago was ultimately funded by him loaning the club the money to pay for it.

The crux of the argument is that directors' loans into clubs should perhaps be treated differently to other types of debts. The reason the EFL brought in their 25p in the pound stipulation was that it was incredibly bad PR for the game for small, local businesses, St Johns' Ambulance, and other worthy causes to be losing out because clubs were eliminating their debts in order to give themselves a fresh start.

HMRC in particular took a particularly dim view of taxpayers being cost money so that football clubs could wipe their slates clean and restart the process of paying lavish wages for players, especially while the game itself seemed to have done little to nothing in order to try and cool down rapidly escalating player wage demands.

Insolvency law is not going to change to appease football clubs or supporters groups, so the onus of any changes to regulations will have to be in the hands of the game's governing bodies. They could require director loans to be treated differently, in the event of a club collapsing into administration. They could outlaw them altogether, requiring all investment into clubs to become non-refundable.

It certainly seems that they need to do something to appease the impression that, for owners, pouring money into clubs into clubs in the form of loans is a 'no-lose gamble' in which they can profit from successful investment while requiring repayment of money put in if their gamble doesn't go their way.

Until the rules are changed, it will remain the case that former owners will always be amongst a club's biggest creditors when something goes wrong. The EFL has spent much of the last twenty years trying to find a balance which weighs the need to keep football competitive and bring investment into clubs with the need to promote fiscal responsibility within clubs and protect the image of the game. The case of Sheffield Wednesday seems to be indicating that they haven't found that balance yet.