Big Sheffield Wednesday off-pitch update emerges - David Storch is not hanging about | OneFootball

The Championship season has ended but there's a lot of work to do at Sheffield Wednesday, as David Storch continues his reorganisation of the club.

The 2025-26 season might have been a calamitous one for Sheffield Wednesday, but work is already proceeding to ensure that next season is a happier one at Hillsborough.

May has turned out to be a pretty good month for Sheffield Wednesday, so far.

The start of the month brought confirmation that the takeover of the club by David Storch's Arise Capital group had been finalised, and the first Saturday of the month brought news that a 15-point deduction will not be applied to the club after all, while the team contributed with a last day win against West Bromwich Albion which marked their first Championship win since September and their first home League win of the season.

But this good news is starting to look like it could only be the beginning. The club are now undergoing renovation on many different levels. A new CEO has been confirmed in the form of the former Sunderland Chief Business Officer David Bruce, a decision which has been warmly received around Hillsborough. Essential work on the stadium has already begun. And it's now being reported that the Owls could be on the brink of another arrival at the club.

Sheffield Wednesday are moving towards hiring their first ever sporting director

The pace of this change can be seen in the amount of work that has started at Hillsborough so soon after the takeover of the club was confirmed, and Alex Miller of the Sheffield Star is now reporting that Storch's group is already focused on bringing in a new sporting director.

The identity of this new sporting director has not yet been confirmed, but it will mark a radical departure from the ownership of Dejphon Chansiri, under whom Sheffield Wednesday never had anybody holding this position. Miller reports that this appointment is "expected sooner rather than later", and while the identity of the new incumbent is unknown, he does confirm that it will not be the Portsmouth sporting director Rich Hughes, with whom the club had been holding discussions.

The new person hired into this position will certainly have a lot of work to do. On top of work that needs to be carried out on the stadium itself, the Sheffield Wednesday first-team squad needs a complete rebuild. They have twelve players falling out of contract at the end of this season, and it's clear from the fact that they finished 2025-26 with just two wins under their belt that a number of new faces will have to be brought in before the start of their 2026-27 season in League One.

The arrival of a sporting director will mean a subtle change of role for Henrik Pedersen

The role of the sporting director changes from club to club, depending on the exact set-up at the club at which they're being appointed, but in general terms, this is considered an executive position in which one person takes overall responsibility for the football side of the club, whether that be their scouting and dealings in the transfer market or overseeing other backroom appointments.

There is a lot of work to do at Hillsborough this summer. Max Lowe and Svante Ingelsson are two players that it's believed that Henrik Pedersen wants to keep for next season, and one of the new sporting director's first jobs at Sheffield Wednesday this summer may well be to tie those two players down to new contracts. With others set to leave and reinforcements needed, it seems likely that this will be a busy summer in the transfer market for the club.

All of this will mean a tweak to the role of Henrik Pedersen. Without a sporting director last season, Pedersen was a 'manager' rather than a 'head coach', but this will be changing as the club aligns to a more modern way of running a football club in which everybody has a strict role that they need to fulfill.

But for now, Sheffield Wednesday fans will be impressed by the pace of change that's taking place around their club. It's very clear that Davod Storch is keen to get everything ready so that the team is in the best position it can be to compete for a quick return to the Championship next season. And it all marks a very sharp contrast indeed with the Dejphon Chansiri years, when the club was operating under a level of operational mismanagement that almost cost their club its very existence.