Mike Ashley holds one advantage over joint American Sheffield Wednesday takeover bid | OneFootball

If experience matters when it comes to running a football club, Mike Ashley holds a key advantage over the joint American bid for Sheffield Wednesday.

Two bidders are leading speculation over the future of Sheffield Wednesday, and one of them may have a distinct advantage over the other.

A decision will soon be made over who the next owners of Sheffield Wednesday will be. They were put into administration on the 24th October, and the club's administrators, Begbie's Traynor, have been running the club on a day-to-day basis since then, as well as inviting bids to buy the troubled Championship club.

They haven't been short of suitors, either. Sheffield Wednesday are a former Premier League club who can attract crowds of over 30,000. As such, there are bags of potential that a new owner could unlock with the right level of investment, coupled with care and attention.

With both the team and the club's Hillsborough stadium itself both in desperate need of renovation, it won't be inexpensive to get this club fully back on its feet, but the potential rewards for doing are huge, enough to more than cover the costs of having bought it in the first place.

Merely getting the club into the Premier League could be worth in excess of £220 million to the club, even if they only managed to stay there for one season. This level of potential reward is undoubtedly a big part of the reason behind why there has been so much interest in EFL clubs from potential investors.

Mike Ashley & an American consortium are among those bidding to buy SheffIeld Wednesday

Two of the leading contenders to have been mentioned in connection with buying Sheffield Wednesday have been a bid which is the result of a merger between two American groups who were interested in buying the club, and British businessman Mike Ashley.

The American bid is a coming together of the Storch family, who had previously been connected with potential investment in League One club Plymouth Argyle, and a group connected to the entrepreneur and investor John McEvoy, who has connections to Sheffield through his stakeholding in the talent agency Various Artists and the Sheffield-formed band Reverend & The Makers.

The other bid is from a name that will be altogether more familiar to British football fans. Mike Ashley is the owner of the Frasers Group, and has previously been involved in the game in this country through owning Newcastle United, as well as having held a minority stake in the Scottish giants Rangers and being the previous owner of Championship leaders Coventry City's home, the CBS Arena.

Ashley has already made a £20 million bid to buy Sheffield Wednesday which was reportedly rejected by the administrators. However, recent reports have indicated that Ashley is preparing a revised, higher bid in order to try and secure ownership of the club.

Mike Ashley's prior experience may give him an edge over his American rivals

Running a football club is not like running any other sort of business, and many have fallen foul of this in the past. And it's this very experience which may give Mike Ashley an edge over the American consortium who are rivaling him at the moment.

Ashley was the owner of Newcastle United for 14 years from 2007 to 2021, and while this period wasn't without its hitches and disruptions, the very experience of having been there and done it for more than a decade may well impress the administrators when it comes to their assessment of who's better positioned to move Sheffield Wednesday forward.

Newcastle fans were often critical of Ashley while he was running their club, but he did keep the club running on an even financial keel, which the club itself acknowledged in defence of Ashley after the owner was singled out for criticism by the former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn in 2019.

Addressing the matter of the need for an independent regulator for football in 2019, Corbyn said in a video posted to the socia media platform X: "A small group of people are ruining our national game. Billionaire football club owners like Mike Ashley, who runs Newcastle United Football Club."

The club responded with a strongly-worded statement, in which they defended Ashley's record on Tyneside: "Financially, other than sums provided to the club on a short-term, interest-free basis and repaid to him as intended, we would like to make it clear that Mike Ashley has not taken a penny out of Newcastle United in interest, salary or dividend, as is customary at many clubs."

While Ashley's record at Newcastle was patchy - the club were relegated to the Championship twice on his watch, though they did return immediately as champions on both occasions - that experience may prove important, when it comes to getting Sheffield Wednesday back to where they could be again.

The unique nature of the football industry could be a big factor in terms of the decision-making process that's undertaken by the administrators, and while there's no question that the Storch family and John McEvoy have clearly been successful in business, they remain unproven in the singular challenge of running a football club.

Mike Ashley may not necessarily be a popular choice among supporters, but the task of reviving Sheffield Wednesday may require experience. And in that one potentially significant area, Ashley may hold an extremely important advantage over his American rivals.