Dejphon Chansiri, the owner of Sheffield Wednesday, is under increasing pressure to sell his team after it was revealed that he had rejected two approaches from an American consortium.
Two proposals to purchase Sheffield Wednesday have been turned down by a consortium led by Adam Shaw, a Sheffield-born businessman now residing in Florida. The club has called the first of the two offers “derisory.”
Wednesday has been the target of bids and outside interest on multiple occasions in recent years, but it is unclear why Chansiri has not sold the team given his distaste for the fans, the failure to achieve the success he had hoped for, and the fact that he has had to spend tens of millions of pounds to keep them afloat.
Prince Abdullah gained a substantial profit from his association with Sheffield United.
The sale of Wednesday’s cross-city competitors at the end of 2024 may help us understand why Chansiri is turning down these bids. In December of that year, Sheffield United was sold to an American group for an estimated £105 million.
This was a nice profit for Prince Abdullah, who invested merely £10 million for a 50% share in the club in 2013 and, following a protracted court struggle, paid £5 million in 2019 to buy out co-owner Kevin McCabe’s shareholding.
Sheffield Wednesday’s true value may differ from Chansiri’s assessment.
However, Abdullah did not receive the sum he had been hoping to sell.
According to reports in 2023, he was seeking £170 million to do so, which appeared to be far more than the club’s actual worth.
The question that then arises is what Chansiri desires in order to relinquish control at Hillsborough. Football clubs can be difficult to value.
The stadium is typically the largest asset of a club, and Hillsborough is still held by a third-party business that Chansiri owns, to which Wednesday has long paid £2.5 million in annual rent.
Would Chansiri still own the stadium and demand rent, or would it be included in any agreement? Right now, this is unclear.
A football team’s annual turnover metrics are the most often cited rough and ready valuation.
Although it’s by no means an exact science, we can get a decent idea of a club’s true value on the open market by looking at its yearly turnover.
Football financial expert Kieran Maguire revealed in an interview with the Sheffield Star that clubs typically sell for 1.5 times their yearly turnover.
According to the most recent data available, this amounts to between £39.5 million to £52.5 million on Wednesday. Given the amount of money he has had to invest in the club over the past few years to keep it afloat, Chansiri may be looking for considerably more than that.
He may also be considering whether he should request the same amount after seeing the £105 million Prince Abdullah got for Sheffield United.
However, the stadium ownership issue is not taken into consideration, and it should be noted that the amount of money Chansiri has had to invest in Wednesday throughout the years has little bearing on the team’s current price.
Premier League television money or parachute payments, which will significantly boost a club’s yearly income, may be even more significant. One may argue that Prince Abdullah was extremely fortunate to have acquired the team for a total of £15 million and then sold it for £105 million.
However, there is no assurance that Chansiri will have this degree of luck.
According to Maguire, Chansiri wants to get back the money he has spent on the club over the years, which is why these proposals are consistently turned down.
“Since Dejphon Chansiri acquired Sheffield Wednesday Football Club in 2015, the club has lost somewhere in the region of £150 to £160 million,” Maguire stated to The Star.
“The owner has paid for such losses. I believe he will be trying to recover the losses he incurred while he was the owner, thus this could be one of the things holding up a purchase.
However, this isn’t how commercial sales are valued. The value of Sheffield Wednesday has not increased in any way as a result of Chansiri’s losses.
Hillsborough hasn’t seen any major renovations in years, and the team isn’t in a higher tier than it was when he took management in 2015.
The sum of money he has had to contribute to compensate for losses brought on by financial irresponsibility has no bearing on Sheffield Wednesday’s present worth. Chansiri will keep grossly overvaluing the club until he is persuaded otherwise, and a sale will continue to be very challenging. Prince Abdullah’s success with Sheffield United at the end of 2024 is not something that everyone receives.
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