The great rebirth of Sheffield Wednesday
Two hours before kick-off and the location in which I’m chatting with Sheffield Wednesday’s new chief executive and brand director is fitting.
We are sat in a dugout on the concrete of the North West Corner. Season ticket holders can win tickets to use the dugout for one game through a ballot. They get pre-match hospitality, oversee the players warm up on the pitch from the touchline and then watch the match with a former player with one of the best views in the house.
The symbolism isn’t subtle. Since 2012, this corner of Hillsborough has been out of use; the only change on the grey steps is the relentless push of weeds through ever-widening cracks.
The new initiative is only a temporary measure – one day they would like this corner full of supporters. But in the short term, you find your quick wins where you can, which is the epitome of the new Wednesday.
Wednesday were my first EFL assignment in each of the last two seasons. One was a 4-0 win over Plymouth Argyle which offered hope of distraction from the Dejphon Chansiri saga. The second was a defeat at Leicester City that reinforced why distraction was only ever a pipe dream.
The experience was far worse for those local journalists who covered it daily (and Alex Miller and Joe Crann deserve recognition for their work), but reporting on Wednesday during the subsequent months was inherently bleak. We almost lost them.
As ever, it was the supporters who suffered most. Some stopped coming at all because they couldn’t bear to see something they cared about so much being mistreated so appallingly and boycott was their only form of control.
Even before then, many arrived just before the match, refused to buy food or merchandise and traipsed out afterwards. That isn’t entertainment or joy; it’s drudgery.
So the shouted chorus of “Hi ho, Sheffield Wednesday” really did hit differently this time. It contained an earthy, defiant edge, but more than that, a demonstrable, raucous pride.
All those times when they didn’t come to sing this song because the owner didn’t deserve their money, or mumbled it when they did come because the owner had killed their spirit. You preserve those emotions somewhere deep inside and let them come out when the day comes.
Related: Wednesday are currently averaging their highest home attendances since the 1960s. All it took was their club almost dying at the hands of a stubborn and desperate man and the subsequent rescue. All they wanted was a reason to come back.
David Bruce is the chief executive and Oscar Chamberlain the brand director. They are merely two important cogs in a new machine led by owner David Storch, the club’s saviour, but their work has been remarkable given the time constraints.
Over £9m has been spent on the stadium and training ground since May to partly atone for the years of neglect.
I am shown around Hirsty’s Bar and the Quixall Club, both newly opened – the number of premium covers has doubled over the course of a summer. In Hirsty’s is more symbolism: “W-E-D-N-E-S-D-A-Y” in large, worn metal letters.
They were found under a stand where they had been left to rot and ruin and presented above the bar – after a quick clean – as a reminder that what happened under Chansiri must never happen again. Everyone can raise a glass to that.
“We came in and thought we’d spend £5m, largely on safety, foundational stuff to make the stadium be a place you want to come to,” Bruce tells The i Paper.
“Flushing the toilets and not getting water coming through the roof. The ability to serve pies and pints in a decent way. But the more you uncovered, the more you saw something you actually wanted to work on too.
“Normally you would get things signed off in the budget at Christmas time, then finalise and start the work when you get to summer. We didn’t start thinking about this stuff until two weeks after the owner owned the club. There’s obviously still bits and pieces getting done. But to get all of that done before the start of the season… I can’t believe how much the team achieved.”
Supporters understandably focus more on on-pitch change and there has been plenty enough of that to keep them excited and busy.
With a squad already decimated thanks to financial emergency, and with severe restrictions over their incoming business (the rules of the takeover meant that they could not spend any money within a transfer deal, including loans, operated under a wage limit and could not reinvest incoming transfer fees), 18 new faces arrived at Hillsborough. Some were certainly eye-catching.
It creates excitement about the team’s potential, but also uncertainty in the truest sense: anyone telling you that they know where Wednesday’s natural position in League One is this season is a fibber.
It must be the mantra at every football club in post-calamity existence: recovery is never a straight line. This is all summed up rather nicely by the home game I attended and its immediate predecessor: 7-2 vs Bromley, 0-0 vs Wigan Athletic.
“This football club has been starved of sustained periods of success for over 40 years irrespective of the level,” says Matt Johnson of Owls Extra, one of my Wednesday confidantes during the bad days.
“I can only speak for myself but I would be happy with a top-half finish given the turnover of the summer, as long as year on year there is direction of travel and a level of transparency.
“That said, the signings and the way the players have talked about where they want to finish has raised expectations, coupled with the start.”
The main thing, I think, is to make people fall in love again. These things are all interrelated, evidently. A supporter is more likely to feel energised when their matchday experience is good and the team winning often is a strong strand of that experience.
But the wider point is that this place – and the congregation who fill it – had received insufficient love for years. It’s not that they didn’t believe in the future – they didn’t even know what they were supposed to be believing in at all. Flick that switch and you have something powerful.
We can talk all day in hushed voices and with misty eyes about what makes us fall in love – and back in love – with our football clubs. It is a cathedral of intangibles and invisible forces. More helpful is to deal in practicality. And the key at Hillsborough lies in the power of communication.
That was the most unforgivable aspect of Chansiri’s reign by the end. Supporters became angry with what they knew, but terrified by what they weren’t being told by an owner burying his head in the sand and cutting all lines of communication.
Handily, that creates such a low bar for the new decision-makers that it becomes their greatest weapon in generating goodwill.
“Let’s communicate and let’s communicate frequently,” Bruce says.
“We’re still not where we need to be with certain things on matchday. So we articulate that in the matchday guide. We want to be very open and honest about that.
“I think a lot of clubs will understandably wait until they are almost at the mid-point of the journey.
Well, we want to tell you about the journey now, because the journey is the most exciting part when you’ve experienced what these people have. It’s intoxicating; it might be a little bit messy at times, but that’s OK because we’re together.”
“There’s also an authenticity there from the owner, an approachability and relatability that is probably quite rare in football,” Chamberlain says.
“They’re quite open to saying, ‘We’re not perfect, we’re not going to get everything right’.
“But what we are going to do is give you the information to ensure that you understand that this is why we took the decision. And if we do make mistakes, we hold our hands up, own it and then be better and do better. Progress that way, rather than trying to make excuses, hide or sweep it under the carpet.”
There are honeymoon periods at football clubs that naturally arrive after they are saved. Wednesday are starting one now. The sun shines brighter, the crowds are noisier, they look forward to matches more fervently and they are able to bask in the glow of security that was absent for too long.
The second stage, often harder to process, is learning to be normal again. That is best reflected in the reaction to setback or misstep and it’s something that Johnson mentions.
When something goes wrong, mistreated fanbases are indoctrinated to view it as the first step along the road to oblivion, even if the perceived offence is relatively minor. That is the legacy of a bad club owner: the emotional scars that their predecessors must tend to.
The only ingredient that matters is time. Time to keep rebuilding. Time to prove that the initial progress was not a distraction tactic or merely a flurry to impress the masses into buying tickets and shirts. Time to create trust. Time to just exist and see what happens without that causing panic or atrophy.
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Chamberlain makes the point that 10 years’ work was done in four months and at the end of it there is still 10 years’ work to do. And that process never stops. That’s how you eradicate the fear that became so all-consuming.
Still, there are mileposts along the road. At full-time against Wigan and the grubby 0-0, there were some boos and groans at Hillsborough. Most were at the referee, I’m sure, but some Wednesday supporters were just annoyed at failing to win at home and extend their early lead at the top of League One.
I love everything about every single one of those boos, because they symbolise normality. They weren’t groaning because their club might not exist next month, or because the owner is refusing to engage with a sale process. They groaned because they drew 0-0 against Wigan, which is exactly how it should be.
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