Dejphon Chansiri will sell Sheffield Wednesday - but one issue must be fixed first | OneFootball

It is clear that Dejphon Chansiri will have to sell Sheffield Wednesday, but his valuation of the club is only going to make doing so difficult.

It is very clear that Dejphon Chansiri is going to have to sell Sheffield Wednesday, but there is one matter that is going to make this more difficult than it needs to be.

With the news that Danny Rohl has left, Sheffield Wednesday's summer of crisis is continuing to deteriorate. The club is giving every impression of falling apart at the seams, and with less than a fortnight to go before the start of the 2025-26 season, things don't seem to be improving at all.

Rohl steered Wednesday to 12th place in the Championship at the end of the 2024-25 season, but that already feels like a very long time ago indeed. With key players having already left the club this summer and a transfer embargo that severely restricts who they can bring in to replace them, Rohl's successor is likely to find managing the team to be a significant challenge.

And Wednesday's crisis is now so severe that it has become existential. At this stage, it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that the club's future could be at risk. The stadium is rotting. Wages aren't being paid on time. Clubs are owed money for transfer fees. The quick route out of this would be for the club to be sold to new owners with the means to get the club back on track, but one matter above all others threatens even this from happening smoothly.

Chansiri's £100 million price-tag drastically over-values Sheffield Wednesday

The Sun has reported that owner Dejphon Chansiri has set an asking price of £100 million to purchase Sheffield Wednesday, and that even this is a reduction on the £150 million that he originally wanted for the club.

This is a demand that flies in the face of any logical sense, because the truth of the matter is that, by whatever metric you choose to use, Sheffield Wednesday simply aren't worth that amount of money.

There is no set value that can be applied to football clubs as a one-size-fits-all approach. All football clubs are different. Some own their own grounds, others don't. Some make money, but most - certainly below the Premier League - don't. And Chansiri seems unaware of the fact that, from a simple, business perspective, what he's selling isn't worth what he thinks it is.

With a sale price of £100 million, Sheffield Wednesday don't offer any value for prospective buyers

While there is no standard way of determining the value of a football club, a decent rule of thumb is that clubs tend to sell for between 1.5 times and twice their annual turnover. Sheffield Wednesday's annual turnover for the 2023-24 season was £26.3 million, which would value the club as being worth somewhere between £40 million and £50 million.

But this isn't an exact science, and with Sheffield Wednesday things get very complicated, very quickly. Consider, for example, Hillsborough itself. The stadium is owned by a third-party company owned by Chansiri, to whom the club pay £2.5 million a year in rent. It's not clear whether Chansiri's valuation includes the stadium, or whether any new owners would have to continue to rent it from him.

The state of the club's accounts would also come under considerable scrutiny. Any new owners would have to turn around a club that has been losing money hand over fist for years, and the condition of Hillsborough is such that millions of pounds may have to be spent on righting a decline caused by years of failing to invest in infrastructure.

Football finance expert Kieran Maguire has previously estimated that Chansiri has lost between £150 million and £160 million since buying the club at the start of 2015, and it feels likely that the owner is trying to recoup what he can from these losses. It's hardly as though he hasn't tried to get others to pay for his mismanagement before. It's less than two years since he was trying to get fans to crowdfund £2 million to pay outstanding debts.

But that isn't how this sort of transaction works. If Chansiri lost a lot of money on Sheffield Wednesday, that's because of the decisions that he ultimately made. Had Sheffield Wednesday gone up to the Premier League in 2016 or 2017, when the spending on players was very high, things might have been very different. But they didn't. This was a gamble that he took, and which he lost, and it's not down to new owners to cover the after-effects of it.

The only way that Sheffield Wednesday can be sold is at a price that buyers will pay. Sensible prospective new owners will baulk at the idea of paying double what the club is actually worth. This is a business whose best staff are starting to leave, whose infrastructure desperately needs upgrading, and who have been losing money for years.

Until Chansiri understands that the club he owns simply isn't worth what he's asking for, there will be no sale, and Sheffield Wednesday's agony will, if anything, only get worse. His position is untenable and there is interest in buying the club, but there won't be at the price he's currently demanding.