New Sheffield Wednesday takeover bidder talking to Chansiri in surprise twist | OneFootball

The former owner of Sheffield Wednesday has thrown another spanner in the works of the club avoiding a 15-point deduction next season.

The saga of how Sheffield Wednesday might avoid a 15-point deduction in League One next season has taken a bizarre new twist, on account of their former owner.

As the 2025-26 season draws to a close, supporters of Sheffield Wednesday could be forgiven giving a huge sigh of relief. Without a win since September and heading for a record low points tally in the entire history of the EFL, this season has been beyond their worst nightmares.

The club's descent into administration at the end of October marked a low which has proved impossible to recover from, and the process of rescuing them through passing them to new owners has proved, to say the least, laborious.

A bid fronted by the professional gambler James Bord floundered over questions relating to the source of the funds being used to finance the bid and, with the season now approaching its end, the sale to the new preferred bidders, Arise Capital, still hasn't been completed.

The reason for this relates to the bids that have been made for the club. Any football club exiting administration is required to pay all creditors a minimum dividend of 25p in the pound or face a 15-point deduction for the start of the following season.

Sheffield Wednesday's biggest creditor by far is soon-to-be former owner Dejphon Chansiri, who put tens of millions of pounds into the club over his decade in charge in loans. But negotiations with Chansiri are, according to reports, now stalling over a bizarre claim made by the former owner.

Chansiri stalling on Sheffield Wednesday deal over surprise claims regarding alternative bidder

Reporting on Patreon, journalist Alan Nixon has confirmed that talks with Chansiri about reducing the amount of his claim so that Sheffield Wednesday can start next season without a 15-point deduction are stalling.

Nixon reports a bizarre set of circumstances, that Chansiri has claimed that another bidder has contacted him directly and offered the 25p in the pound that he'd been hoping for. No indication is given of who this bidder was, how much they offered, or why they chose to circumvent the administration process through contacting Chansiri directly rather than the insolvency practitioners dealing with the case, Begbies Traynor.

He also confirms that this matter "is not likely to stop Arise going ahead with their own deal", although it does increase the likelihood of the club starting next season with that 15-point deduction in place, although he does also suggest that it could yet influence the EFL's thinking over any points deduction "if they can be convinced that Chansiri has been obstructive and unrealistic."

Chansiri could yet throw a spanner in the works of a fresh start for Sheffield Wednesday

If anything, this report indicates that Dejphon Chansiri doesn't understand the legal process at play once a business enters into administration. The bid made by Arise Capital made them preferred bidders for the club, granting them a period of exclusivity in the process to secure new ownership of the club.

Dejphon Chansiri simply can't field offers from potential alternative bidders himself. At the point at which the club entered into administration, he effectively signed a declaration confirming his assent to licensed insolvency practitioners taking responsibility for the day-to-day running of the club and its sale. He surrendered the right to field bids from other parties at this point. If someone did make a bid directly to him, what he should have done is refer them to Begbies Traynor.

Furthermore, neither is there any sensible reason why anyone looking to make a bid at the level of £30 million - the amount required to swerve that points deduction - would make it directly to Chansiri rather than Begbies Traynor. Any reputable business or individual making such an offer should reasonably be presumed to either know this, or to have taken the advice of somebody who does.

The standard legal mechanism by which a business successfully exits administration is called a Company Voluntary Arrangement (CVA), and any CVA proposal has to be accepted by at least 75% of creditors (by value) before it can become legally binding. Chansiri, then, would have the legal right to reject the CVA proposal.

But even this worst case scenario this would be highly unlikely to personally benefit him. To do so would lead to a strong likelihood of the club being liquidated and its assets sold, but Sheffield Wednesday do not have many assets that would be worth much in what would, if it got to that point, essentially be a fire sale. Hillsborough itself is owned by Sheffield 3 Ltd., a company owned by Chansiri, but this was put into administration at the same time as the football club.

The entire point of the administration process is that it's in the best interests of everybody involved - including creditors themselves - for businesses to be rescued as going concerns. It is vanishingly unlikely that Chansiri would receive more as a result of the club being liquidated.

Chansiri has a history of making strange and self-serving claims such as this. It's now been a year since it was reported that he rejected a bid from an American consortium as "derisory" and it was later reported that he was holding out for the £100 million that he believed the club to be worth at that time.

Of course, the question of how much any business is "worth" is always open-ended. But at its most fundamental level, any business is only worth what somebody is prepared to pay for it, and the only bid received since the club entered administration which met the threshold required to avoid that 15-point deduction failed.

It's already known that buying Sheffield Wednesday will only be the start of the costs for any new owner. Hillsborough requires extensive work to be carried out on it, and manager Henrik Pedersen's squad needs extensive renovation.

If Sheffield Wednesday in their current condition aren't worth £30 million, the simple fact of the matter is that this is because of the way in which Chansiri himself mismanaged the club over a period of years. That his intransigence might yet lead to the club not getting the completely fresh start they so desperately need may not be news that Sheffield Wednesday