The 5 most overrated Sheffield Wednesday players in history named and ranked by AI | OneFootball

Sheffield Wednesday have had quite a few players who've promised a lot but delivered little over the years, and we asked ChatGPT to rank the worst.

Sheffield Wednesday have had quite a few players over the years who promised a great deal but delivered very little, so Football League World have asked AI to rank the worst of the worst.

It would be reasonable to suggest that Sheffield Wednesday supporters might not be looking forward to the start of the 2025-26 season.

With the club under a transfer embargo, uncertainty over talk of a takeover and difficulties in paying wages, it's been a summer from hell for the Championship club, and none of the serious questions being posed of the club at the end of last season seem to have been successfully answered.

Like most clubs, Wednesday have had their fair share of underperforming players over the years, those who arrived at Hillsborough promising a lot but who ended up delivering very little indeed, so FLW has asked ChatGPT to rank the worst of the worst, each one of whom is a cautionary tale of what can go wrong in the transfer market.

Signed in February 2004 from FC Midtjylland, the Danish striker never fully adapted to the English game and made just 12 appearances for the Owls - ten in the League and two in the EFL Trophy - before leaving the club at the end of the season, after failing to score a single goal for them.

4 Stevie May

Wednesday beat a host of rival clubs to sign the young Scottish striker Stevie May from St Johnstone in August 2014 for £800,000, but the player failed to deliver and left for Preston North End the following summer.

May was a regular in the Wednesday team throughout the 2014-15 season and scored his first goal for them in only his third League appearance.

But he could only score six further times throughout the season and, with Dejphon Chansiri having taken ownership of the club in mid-season, he was moved on to Preston at the end of that disappointing season.

3 Urby Emanuelson

The arrival of Urby Emanuelson caused considerable excitement at Hillsborough. Over ten years from 2004 to 2014, he'd made more than 350 appearances for two of Europe's biggest clubs, Ajax and AC Milan, while also making 16 appearances for the Netherlands national team.

But his arrival at Hillsborough in 2016 turned out to be a huge disappointment. A serious ankle injury didn't help, but the Wednesday manager preferred Danny Pudil in Emanuelson's position, and when the Dutch midfielder finally did make his debut for them, it was with 15 minutes to play on the last weekend of the regular season. Emanuelson left the club for FC Utrecht at the end of that season, where he played until his retirement in 2022.

Almen Abdi and Sheffield Wednesday could have been a match made in heaven. The attacking midfielder signed for Wednesday in the summer of 2016 for £4 million from Watford, where he'd been a bit of a fan favourite, winning their Player of the Season Award in 2013 and having both been part of their team which were promoted to the Premier League in 2015 and a regular for them in the top flight.

But instead, Abdi spent three unhappy years at Hillsborough, making just 23 appearances for the club before being released in 2019. Speaking after the event to The Athletic, Abdi knew where to put the blame. “I needed a manager who trusted me, who believed in me, who pushed me", he told them, He [Carvalhal] didn’t do that. He’s energetic, he’s enthusiastic. He’s a really good coach and he did well. But he didn’t trust me."

He even claimed to have asked to leave the club several occasions, only for his requests to be ignored. Abdi retired from playing after being released by the club at the end of his contract in 2019.

It will be no great surprise to Wednesday fans to see Jordan Rhodes at the top - or bottom, depending on which way you look at it - of ChatGPT's list.

Rhodes originally joined Wednesday at the end of the January 2017 transfer window on loan from Middlesbrough for the rest of the season, and at the end of the season the club made the signing permanent. The fee? A whopping £10 million, a figure which remains their record transfer fee paid eight years on, and double the next highest fee they've ever paid for a player.

But his first season at Hillsborough was a disaster for both the club and the player. Wednesday finished the 2016-17 season in 4th place in the Championship before losing in the semi-finals of the play-offs to Huddersfield Town, but slumped to 15th the following season. For his part, Rhodes could only manage five goals in 31 League appearances for the club.

He was shipped out on a season-long loan to Norwich in the summer of 2018, but his goal return there was little better and he returned to Hillsborough at the end of 2018-19 to see out the last two years of his contract before returning to Huddersfield Town. In total, he could only manage 20 goals over his three seasons with Sheffield Wednesday, in 112 appearances for the club.

Rhodes is now best-remembered as the highest-profile flop of Dejphon Chansiri's first couple of seasons running the club. Wednesday could do with the money that the club were throwing around then, but with three of the five players on this list having been signed during those early Chansiri years, they could also do without him being the person in charge of the club's purse-strings.