Sheffield Wednesday takeover: How likely is it? | OneFootball

Sheffield Wednesday have been subject to more takeover talk than most clubs in recent years, so with that chatter having started again, is it likely?

Sheffield Wednesday ended their 2024/25 season in a state of crisis, with revelations about the club's financial position, uncertainty over the future of their head coach, and charges from the EFL.

On the pitch, Wednesday had a decent enough season. They finished in 12th place in the Championship under Danny Rohl, a substantial improvement on the 20th place they'd managed a year earlier.

But with the end of the season has come a series of stories which have indicated that the club's position could be precarious. The EFL have charged the club over late payments to players in March and May, while a late payment to HMRC at the end of October may only exacerbate the punishment that they end up receiving.

Meanwhile, the future of head coach Danny Rohl is up in the air. Rohl is sought-after by other clubs, and it seems highly unlikely that he will still be with the club by the start of next season. But the possibility of a return to the Bundesliga floundered on the basis of the £5 million release clause for him to leave, and as yet club owner Dejphon Chansiri has refused to sack him.

There have been rumours regarding a Wednesday takeover for several months

These occasional periods of unease are nothing new to Sheffield Wednesday fans, and the most obvious exit route for the club from them would be for the club to be sold.

There have been persistent rumours for years that Wednesday could be about to be sold, but there's little indication that they actually will.

During the 2024/25 season alone, Chansiri rejected two bids from an American consortium, while other names such as the former Wigan Athletic chairman Talal Al Hammad and Anis Sefrioui, a Moroccan businessman who was believed to be interested in buying into English football, have also been mentioned.

The biggest obstacle to Sheffield Wednesday being sold seems to be Chansiri himself

It certainly isn't that there isn't interest in buying Sheffield Wednesday. Such is the belief that this is urgently needed that the matter has even been raised in parliament.

But there is no mechanism for the EFL, the FA, or anybody else to force Chansiri to sell the club, so long as he remains within the confines of the Owners & Directors Test. In the case of Reading FC last season, this is what happened with the club's former owner Dai Yongge, and the sale to Rob Couhig duly went through at the end of the season.

Sheffield Wednesday's situation, however, is different. There have been plenty of fan protests against Chansiri, while comment in the local press has reached the point of pleading with him to sell up.

The Sheffield Star spoke to football finance expert Kieran Maguire at the start of June about why Chansiri appears so reluctant to sell, and his explanation was the size of the losses that he's incurred since running the club.

"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 he made during his period of ownership."

Maguire explained that clubs of a similar size tend to sell for around one and a half to two times their annual revenue, which would value Wednesday at around £40-50 million, less than a third of Chansiri's losses. Since the stadium is owned by a third-party company owned by Chansiri, yet another layer of complexity is added to any proposed sale.

Maguire's conclusion was stark: "If the owner is looking for substantially more than that - and listening to some of the people who claim to have had negotiations, he is certainly asking for far more than anybody he's willing to bid - I think he's going to struggle to sell the club."

The bottom line is that Sheffield Wednesday cannot and will not be sold until a buyer makes an offer that Dejphon Chansiri will accept, and that the only circumstances under which a sale could be forced through would see the club plunged into an even more risky position than they're in now.

The club's summer of uncertainty seems set to continue, for the time being, at least, with a takeover not seemingly imminent.