How much it cost to buy Sheffield United as Sheffield Wednesday urged to seal takeover | OneFootball

Sheffield Wednesday have rejected offers to sell the club, but Prince Abdullah might have got a little lucky with what he both bought and sold United.

The pressure is mounting on the Sheffield Wednesday owner Dejphon Chansiri to sell his club, with the news having emerged that he has turned down two offers from an American consortium.

A group fronted by the Sheffield-born, Florida-based businessman Adam Shaw has made two bids to buy Sheffield Wednesday, but both offers have been rejected, with the first of the two having been described by the club as "derisory".

Wednesday have been subject to bids and outside interest more than once in recent years, but Chansiri's exact reasons for not selling the club when he is so unpopular with supporters, the success for which he had hoped has not materialised, and he's had to pour in tens of millions of pounds just to keep them afloat himself, has not been made explicitly clear.

Prince Abdullah made a handsome profit off his involvement with Sheffield United

We can perhaps gain some understanding of why Chansiri is rejecting these offers from the sale of Wednesday's cross-city rivals at the end of 2024.

Sheffield United were sold to an American consortium for a price reported to have been £105 million in December of that year.

This represented a healthy profit for Prince Abdullah, who paid just £10 million's worth of investment into the club for a 50% stake in 2013 and then bought out co-owner Kevin McCabe's shareholding for £5 million in 2019 after a lengthy legal battle.

Chansiri's valuation of Sheffield Wednesday may not be what the club is actually worth

Abdullah didn't receive the amount that he'd been looking for in order to sell, though. In 2023, it was reported that he was looking for £170 million to do so, an amount which seemed to completely out-strip the value of the club itself.

So the question becomes that of what Chansiri wants in order to hand over the reins at Hillsborough.

Valuing football clubs can be a tricky business.

Most clubs' biggest asset will be the stadium, and Hillsborough remains under the ownership of a third-party company owned by Chansiri to which Wednesday have been paying £2.5 million a year in rent for some considerable time.

Would the stadium be part of any deal, or would Chansiri continue to own and want rent for it? This isn't clear at present.

The most commonly used rough and ready valuation for a football club will come from their annual turnover figures. It's far from a precise science, but a quick look at a club's annual turnover can give us a reasonable ballpark figure for how much a club is actually worth on the open market.

Speaking to the Sheffield Star, football finance expert Kieran Maguire confirmed that clubs normally sell for between one and a half times and double their annual turnover. Based on the latest available figures, this values Wednesday at around £39.5 million to £52.5 million.

If Chansiri is looking for much higher than that, it could be on the basis of the amount of money that he's had to put into the club to keep it afloat over the last few years. He might also be looking at the £105 million that Prince Abdullah received for Sheffield United and wondering whether he should be asking for the same.

But this doesn't take into account the stadium ownership situation, and it should be added that the amount of money that Chansiri has had to pour into Wednesday over the years doesn't really make any difference to its current valuation. And far more important could be Premier League television money or parachute payments, both of which will enormously increase a club's annual turnover.

Having bought into the club for £15 million in total and then selling the club for £105 million, it might be argued that Prince Abdullah got very lucky over Sheffield United.

But there are no guarantees that Chansiri will have this level of luck. Maguire suggested that the reason these bids keep on being rejected is that Chansiri wants to recoup the money he has spent on the club over the years.

"Since Dejphon Chansiri acquired Sheffield Wednesday Football Club in 2015, the club has lost somewhere in the region of £150 to £160 million," Maguire told The Star. “Those losses have been covered by the owner. This might be one of the issues that is slowing down a deal, because I suspect he'll be looking to recoup the losses that he made during his period of ownership."

But this isn't how valuing commercial sales works. Chansiri's losses haven't improved the value of Sheffield Wednesday in any way. The club aren't in a higher division than they were in when he took over in 2015 and Hillsborough hasn't been redeveloped in any significant way in years.

The amount of money he's had to put in to cover losses caused by financial profligacy is an irrelevance to Sheffield Wednesday's current value. Until Chansiri can be talked away from that, he will continue to drastically over-value the club, and a sale will remain extremely difficult. Not everybody gets as lucky as Prince Abdullah did with Sheffield United at the end of 2024.