We Need to Talk about Wednesday
Should the mega-rich be allowed to own football?
This piece has nothing to do with Bulgaria. And it hurts. As things stand, there is every possibility that the Sheffield Wednesday team might not turn up on Saturday for the first game of the 25-26 season. A few things have happened: The club has run out of money; the North Stand at Hillsborough has been closed by the council on safety grounds; many players have walked away; and the English Football League (EFL) have imposed a transfer ban. Even for those who don’t go to the matches, for half the people of this city, it is this football club that defines their identity. That is hundreds of thousands of people. What has happened? Why don’t the council step in? What can be done? Nobody really knows. This last week, I have listened to podcast presenters and pundits on Radio Sheffield, trying to answer these questions. I have watched grown men break down in tears on Youtube. Nobody can fathom how the bedrock of their cultural life, the backbone of their identity is under threat of extinction. The club is in danger of just falling apart.
The simple answer, the cause, is the erratic action of one man, the current chairman and owner, Thai businessman, Dejphon Chansiri. But there is also a long answer, a more complex one, and that is the whole premise behind the financial control of modern football which itself, stems from everything that has gone wrong with the UK since 1979 under Margaret Thatcher and then Tony Blair. The entire Neo-Liberal project lies behind the shitshow in Sheffield 6. And there is no more fitting place for it to play out.
Sheffield city council in the 1980s under David Blunkett was a beacon of socialist thought and action, in opposition to Thatcher and the Tories down in Westminster. But then came New Labour, Tony Blair and now Keir Starmer, under whose leadership the socialists in the Labour Party were either thrown out or persuaded to become something else. Blunkett himself took the job as Home Secretary. The Sheffield council, still run by Labour today is no longer the ‘socialist republic of south Yorkshire’. A few years ago it decided to go to war with its residents and fell hundreds of much-loved trees in the city. All for a private contract.
All the current Sheffield MPs have watched the crisis at Wednesday unfold. They can also see their own impotence. They have written letters and made them public. When they sent one to the owner, Dejphon Chansiri, his response was instructive,
‘what has it got to do with you?’ he said.
The owner sees this football club as his own property where as everyone else in the city regards it as a community asset, almost as a way of life. The revenue comes from die-hard fans who pay for replica shirts, merchandise and ticket sales but there is also money coming in from corporate sponsorship, player transfer deals and TV revenue. There is always a tension between these two faces of modern football clubs. Even when it comes to Manchester United and Liverpool. The fans, whose everyday mood and happiness is governed by its highs and lows, have very little say over how the club is run. Their loyalty is expected, in fact it is demanded. Should an institution with such cultural importance which has a massive stake in people’s hearts and in the fabric of the community, ever be run for a profit as a business. There are huge risks for the clubs who do not excel. Everything is fine when things go well like in Newcastle or Liverpool or Manchester but when the shit hits the fan because of mis-management on this scale, there is not a great deal we can do to stop the club from just falling off the cliff.
I know at first-hand, how much this football team means. I moved with my family to the Hillsborough area of Sheffield in 1991 on the very night that Wednesday beat Chelsea in the second leg of the Rumbelows cup semi-final to secure a place at Wembley. For a second division club that was quite something, especially when they went on to beat Manchester United in the final. That was the beginning of a spell in the top league. The golden years. On that night in 1991, I remember opening up the velux window in the attic roof of our terraced house to see the Hillsborough ground a few streets away, the floodlights lighting up the night sky and hearing the din from thousands of people singing. I turned on the radio to catch the final minutes of the game and then after the final whistle, Roy Hattersley on pitch-side trying to make himself heard to the interviewer, his voice hoarse. You could hear the elation. And that was it. Hooked. We lived there for four years and saw Chris Waddle arrive with Trevor Francis as manager and then the team reached two cup finals in one year and were third in the first division. Heady days. From that iconic team of the early 90s, five players went on to become managers themselves and three to become TV pundits and household names. But the big eye opener for me and my kids, was not just the match days when the streets were full of people, nor the quality of the noise coming from the ground during the games but the feeling that this club, this team and all those players, belonged to this place and to this community. It was easy to feel like you belonged. My eldest son is still a season ticket holder, twenty years on.
The mis-management of the club by an eccentric and foolish chairman has now reached a head. Details are not clear, as most of the people in the belly of the beast cannot speak out because they have probably signed non-disclosure agreements. The clamour for Chansiri to sell the club is now so loud that he has no choice to do so. But. There is a but. Something seems to be preventing a sale from happening and nobody knows what it is. Does he have huge loans against the club or the ground? Is he asking too high a price? Players and staff have been paid late for three consecutive months. There are also missed payments to HMRC and to other clubs for transfer deals. Even the admin staff and the backroom staff were not paid on time. We will see what will happen on the first day of the season. But anything is possible, except a Wednesday win.
The football regulator is a new thing. It was set up to scrutinize financial running of football clubs and to look after the interest of fans in cases like this. When they start their work later this year, the Wednesday file is sure to be on their desk. It is not clear what they can actually do and by then it might be too late. Everyone accepts that there is more to institutions like Sheffield Wednesday than money-making. The same can be said for privatized water companies, universities, railway franchises, local councils, Social care, the NHS, schools etc, etc. Every corner of public life, every institution we depend on, is slowly being transferred from public ownership to private business. That means that the people they serve are replaced by shareholders. Companies need to generate profits for dividends, rather than to serve the public interest, the public good.
The Wednesday fan-base is not known for its radical stance on issues like this and many of the protests against Chansiri have led to fans openly criticizing each other, disagreeing over tactics. A large sector of Wednesday fans would rather not rock the boat in case their actions might be interpreted as disloyal, because let’s face it, this is more like a church or a family than a business with customers. The fans have faith and they protect the club’s image at all costs. But surely now, faced with near extinction, every single fan will need to make it clear what they think because nobody, not one Wednesday fan supports what this owner is doing. And fans like these cannot just walk away from clubs they have supported all their lives.
The captain Barry Bannan, who played 27 games for Scotland, has just signed a contract to stay. What a guy. He and his young family feel at home in Sheffield. He can see how the club is embedded in this community because he is now part of it. Let’s hope this persuades other players to stay as well. If they do not, we might well be seeing Bannan, an experienced player (who looks like an athletic troll with a comb-over) leading out a youth team when Wednesday play Leicester City on Saturday because the only players left are under the age of 18. I guess once the protests are over, if this game actually goes ahead, all we can do is cheer on the kids and hope for the best. That is now all we can expect from a system that has failed us all.