Why Sheffield Wednesday is the only club named after a day | OneFootball

The unique name for the Owls comes with a similarly unique backstory

Sheffield Wednesday are the only club in English football to be named after a day.

Many clubs, including their Steel City rivals from Bramall Lane, follow a familiar pattern of attaching United, City, Wanderers, Town or County to the end of their geographical place name.

But the Owls are unique in having had the name of a day attached to their club since its formation in 1867.

Here’s how it came about…

Why Sheffield Wednesday have "Wednesday" in their name

The club was originally formed as a sister organisation to the Wednesday Cricket Club, itself believed to have been formed somewhere between 1816 and 1820.

Those original members of the cricket team tended to work a half-day on a Wednesday, so naturally, that was the best day to get together to play.

The cricket team was then named after their regular playing day, Wednesday, with most members being traders wanting to stick to the midweek schedule.

That is where the football side of the operation comes in, originally formed to supplement the cricket team.

How a cricket club became Sheffield Wednesday Football Club

As any cricket fan will tell you, the worst opponent in the sport is often the weather, with rain regularly interrupting play, making it strictly a summer sport, even to this day with modern technology.

Football is not free from weather battles, but it is rare that rain will interfere with the schedule, and so the Wednesday Cricket Club decided to set up a football team to keep their players fit through the winter.

With the same working week still prevalent as traders, they kept to the Wednesday schedule when turning their attention to football.

Naturally, with the schedule the same and the association to the cricket club strong, the team was formed as The Wednesday Football Club in 1867.

The Owls soon surpassed their cricket-playing founders

It didn’t take long for the football operation to truly take off, building momentum on the cusp of the professionalisation of the sport.

In 1882, the cricket club and the football club formally separated, before the Owls turned professional just five years later.

They joined the Football League in 1892, before becoming commonly known as Sheffield Wednesday, as they’re still known today, in 1929.

The Owls were one of the founding members of the Premier League exactly 100 years later, now regarded the pinnacle of domestic football, and have never dropped below England’s top three divisions since becoming a professional club.

The same success cannot be claimed for the original cricket club, having disbanded in 1924, before being resurrected in 2011 by Wednesday-supporting cricket fans, a reformation that was still going almost a decade later, and were still on the hunt for new players on social media as recently as 2022.

All those years ago, the founding cricket-playing members would scarcely have believed the institution that Sheffield Wednesday has become today, but their work in forming the club remains one of the most unique backstories of any club, represented perfectly by their one-of-a-kind name.