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London – One of the world’s oldest soccer teams has a major problem.
More than 3,000 travel fans will not be seated to cheer on their beloved team known as the Owls as FC begins their new season on Sunday in Leicester City, the second tier of British football.
Instead, they will hold a five-minute protest against one man outside King Power Stadium in Leicester: the owner of Wednesday, the focus of a growing crisis that could threaten his very existence.
The team’s financial problems have risen, and attempts to sell it have dominated local sports media and online forums for months. And the crisis has had a major impact on the health of British football, apart from the flashy wealth of Liverpool and Manchester City.
The issue is so severe that the UK government has passed a new law that polices the buying and selling of teams and launches football regulators to ensure that the owners are “appropriate and appropriate.”
For Wednesdays, founded in 1867, it could be too little, too late.
Some teams have a bad offseason, but this summer there is a new level of disruption set on Wednesday. Players and staff have not been paid on time for four months of the past five months. As a result, there is a transfer embargo that prohibits clubs from purchasing new players by January 2027.
At least 15 players remained in just a small portion of the free transfer or market value this summer, leaving barely enough players to fill a match-day team of 11 starters and up to nine alternatives.
“It’s becoming a soap opera,” said Dan Fudge, who co-hosted the popular podcast “The Wednesday Week.”
“Usually, as podcasters, we hurt the content we talk about over the summer,” Fudge said.
The list of accidents continues. Talented young head coach Danny Roll is a charismatic, brain German who has been a huge success in major European leagues, left by mutual agreement.
The famous Old Hillsborough Stadium is literally falling apart. Sheffield City Council refused to grant a vast 9,000-seat North Stand safety licence due to concerns about terrace wiring and crack discovery.
The club said in a statement this week that it is working to fix this and will attempt to place season ticket holders elsewhere if they still close at their first home game on August 16th.
The club did not respond to NBC News’ requests for comment.
Changsiri says he wants to sell, but no one has met the club’s ratings so far. The owner has widely reportedly provided the club for £100 million ($134 million). Kieran Maguire, a leading UK football finance expert and commentator, has a real value of £40 million ($53 million), but Changsiri said in June that he rejected an offer at this price from a US-based consortium.
Maguire said it’s unlikely that it will be completely destroyed on Wednesday, but he said that in any case, the team will almost certainly be relegated to the lower league and face a very tough season.
“He’s not malicious in the sense that he doesn’t want to destroy a football club, but he’s very naive and has no knowledge of the industry,” Maguire said.
English football culture is one of the expenses. This summer alone, 20 Premier League teams spent about £1.8 billion ($2.4 billion) on relocation fees.
And the contrast between the top and the rest of the soccer pyramid system is harsh.
Among them, Premier League clubs earned more than £6 billion ($8 billion) in the 2024-25 season, up 36% from the previous year, according to consulting firm Deloitte.
Meanwhile, the league, which was the fifth in Europe, all teams in the Championship, suffered an operating loss in the same period for the second consecutive season.
There is money from television, sponsorships, player sales, and game day revenue, but with huge wage bills, clubs rely on players sales.
The English Football League said on Wednesday it was in “advanced discussion” about how to sell shares in the club with Chansiri lawyers. The league was criticized by several fans for not acting early, and the club warned on a massive scale in Thailand that “it is necessary to mandate his commitment to the sale to the funded parties or raise good for the sake of fair market value.”
Will things even get worse? probably.
This week, Morecambe FC, a team from the same name in the northwest coastal town, was suspended from the National League, the fifth tier in the vast pyramid-shaped league system of British football.
If Morecambe is unable to fulfill its financial obligations and cannot find a new buyer to support it, it could disappear forever. This happened to Hereford’s Berry, Macclesfield Town, and other teams with too much debt, with the owners unable to support them.
“There’s a sense of precognition about clubs. I’ve seen other clubs do that. Usually someone comes in and comes in and [stages] Fudge said.
“Then in recent years you’ve seen what happened to teams like Berry and Morecum recently, and they’ve had that White Knight not intervening. Suddenly, you’re thinking, ‘Wait a minute, we can have a big scalp.’ ”
Like many fans, Fudge has no doubts who will be responsible. “Pure incompetence is how we’re here since around 2018, regardless of warning signs around Changsiri.”
Fans warmly remember the 1990s. Chris Waddle, David Hurst and Death Walker (all England International) helped the club reach seventh place in the Premier League during the 1996-97 season, alongside some of Europe’s hottest talents.
Fans were optimistic when Shan Siri, a Scion of Thai Union Group, a seafood conglomerate that owns the Chicken of the Sea Tuna brand, took over in 2015.
This feels like it was a long time ago, and fans are wondering what shape the new football regulator will take and whether it will make a difference.
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David Blanket, a senior minister of the Tony Blair government in the 1990s and 2000s and now a Senator, is a lifelong Wednesday fan and attended an online meeting with the Football League on Thursday. He said it was “important” that Wednesday’s crisis was addressed before regulators were established.
“Rep., including those representing the city, trust in supporters, and other fans, will continue to be clearly under pressure for the immediate resolution of the crisis in Hillsboro,” he told NBC News.
He came from the north side of Sheffield in South Yorkshire, a city famous for steel, and became an early member of the Football Association on Wednesday (the term “soccer” is an abbreviation for “association”).
The team has won a unique name from cricket. In the mid-19th century, there were several teams in Sheffield playing the game, and the teams that played on Wednesday started out as soccer teams. It’s packed with names.
On Sunday, fans grow banners and scream slogans in an attempt to preserve that history. Even if someone just wants to watch the game.
“There are so many people in the camp where we have ‘Protest, let’s pass this message as much as we can’t’, and I totally agree, but not everyone is a bag because a lot of people use football to spend time with family and friends,” Fudge said.
Despite the disruption at the club, Wednesday sold out 3,287 away ticket allocations for Sunday’s game. It’s not immediately clear how many more Wednesday games will be.
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