As details started to emerge from the fans’ forum meeting between Sheffield Wednesday owner Dejphon Chansiri and a few hundred of the club’s supporters, an AI-generated video was posted on social media captioned: “Footage of Chansiri leaving Hillsborough Stadium last night.”
It was a replication of the scene from The Dark Night when the Joker, played marvellously by Heath Ledger, walks away from Gotham General hospital while a series of explosions erupt behind him. When the explosions stop, he pauses, fiddling with a detonator until a final giant eruption brings the whole building down. The Joker had been replaced by Chansiri.
Speaking to people who attended the meeting last week, it doesn’t sound far off the mark. A marathon event inside the 1867 Lounge started at 7pm and lasted until nearly 1am, full of tense exchanges, extraordinary claims, aggressive responses and strained an already fragile relationship between the fans of a once great football club and its erratic owner.
Chansiri called the meeting after receiving “abusive and often threatening” emails from some fans, a club spokesperson told The i Paper. Going into it, supporters had been in buoyant spirits – especially in comparison to recent years.
To recap a little: in November 2023 when The i Paper first covered the astonishing decline at Sheffield Wednesday, a club that were once one of the leading sides in the country in the 90s was enduring the worst start to a Championship season in history.
A protest group formed from the discontent – named The 1867 Group – while Chansiri made a series of bizarre decisions, including asking 20,000 fans to chip in to help fund the club and publishing a stunning 1,464-word statement on the club website blaming supporters for not spending enough money.
Fans believed their club was already down, facing up to the bleak prospect of a second Championship relegation in four years. Until in came Danny Rohl, who had coached at Bayern Munich and Southampton and been the assistant coach for the Germany national team but had never been a manager. At 33 years old he became the EFL’s youngest ever.
They went on a storming run of form that would have nabbed them a play-off spot had he been in place all season, avoiding relegation by three points, in what was dubbed “The Great Escape”.
On a bottom six budget Rohl has worked wonders again, keeping the club on the cusp of the play-off places and in touch with the tantalising prospect of the Premier League.
And then came that wild fans’ forum, midway through a January transfer window that had been eerily quiet at a time when everyone involved hoped that Rohl might be backed for a final Premier League push.
“Chansiri came to this forum and killed everything,” Rob Oldfield, one of the founders of The 1867 Group, tells The i Paper.
For a start, it irked supporters that Chansiri had charged £10 to attend.
A club spokesperson said that the entry fee was to ensure fans didn’t book a place and not attend and to raise a donation to a charity of the attendees’ choice.
“It was made clear that all proceeds after costs would be donated to charity,” the spokesperson added.
“The entry fee also included a hot meal.
“The chairman doubled the money raised, which was circa £5,000 to be donated to the Sheffield Children’s Hospital.”
Around 300 fans turned up and, Oldfield adds, “It was quite heated.”
Ian Bennett, chair of the Sheffield Wednesday Supporters’ Trust, was also there.
“The answers were waffle and fairly aggressive,” he says.
“Accusations being fired about, Chansiri was trying to blame everyone for the nasty and personal emails to him, when I think everyone at the forum had gone in with an open mind and wanting to ask questions.”
Nobody in the room disagreed that the abusive emails are unacceptable, but were surprised to be blamed for them.
“Chansiri asked: ‘what am I doing wrong?’” Oldfield recalls.
“I just laughed. We’ve had this for the last seven or eight years. I don’t know how he can’t see what’s going wrong.”
At the top table sat Chansiri – son of Kraisorn Chansiri, founder of the multi-billion-pound Thai Union Group, the world’s biggest canned tuna producer – alongside various club officials.
Oldfield was the second person to take the mic and asked what Chansiri thought of the protests against his ownership last season. A banner was strung across an entrance at Hillsborough bearing the words: “Dejphon Chansiri. Not fit or proper. Sell the club”.
“It turned into a really heated exchange,” Oldfield says.
“He said the protest crossed the line and we disrespected him.
“If we don’t like what’s going on at the club at the minute, don’t come, which is a bizarre thing to say.”
The club spokesperson described some “fiery exchanges at times, born from passion on both sides”, adding: “The chairman has always respected the right for any peaceful protest that does not cross lawful lines.”
Oldfield asked Chansiri about his suggestion that if the fans don’t want him at the club, he would sell.
“He said it wasn’t his job to find a buyer – it’s the fans’ job. It was a back and forth and they had to take the mic off me. I had loads of questions to ask.”
“The chairman does not see it as his responsibility to find a buyer when he has no intention of selling the club,” the club spokesperson said.
“However, if fans want him to sell then of course they must bring a legitimate buyer to the table.”
The 1867 Group have taken up the challenge and are planning a demonstration at the upcoming home game against Luton Town, where they will distribute “For Sale” leaflets asking prospective buyers to contact Chansiri.
Oldfield says from there the meeting “went completely downhill”.
Naturally, plenty of questions were about the lack of activity in the transfer market, and it sparked another shock revelation from Chansiri that he had not spoken to Rohl, that it was up to Rohl to come to him with a list of targets.
It was pointed out to Chansiri that as chairman of the football club maybe he could take it upon himself to meet or speak with Rohl.
“It was really childish,” Bennett says.
The club spokesperson insisted: “If the manager requires reinforcements during the January transfer window, the onus is on him to source and provide a list of targets to present to the chairman, as has always been the case.”
It is understood Rohl has, since the meeting, been part of a meeting about potential signings.
But it is indicative of a poor relationship between the owner and a manager many consider Wednesday’s best since Ron Atkinson won promotion to the top flight and the League Cup in 1991.
Southampton are believed to have approached Wednesday about appointing Rohl in December but were rebuffed, which may have added to soured relations.
Bennett fears Chansiri will force Rohl to “walk away in the summer”.
In the meantime, whether they can afford new players is another matter.
It is claimed Chansiri let slip that an early bird season-ticket sale in December was launched to create a cash injection for January.
“There’s obviously cash flow issues at the club,” Oldfield says.
The Wednesday spokesperson insisted that this is a continuation of strategy that predates the chairman and that Chansiri has always been transparent regarding “occasional cash flow concerns”.
Nonetheless, a season that started so promisingly is unravelling.
The players have been forced to train on the pitch at Hillsborough after the pitches at their Middlewood Road training ground were frozen.
“Sheffield, like much of the country, was hit hard by the cold snap, which impacted the ability to train at Middlewood Road and six training sessions took place at the stadium, which is equipped with undersoil hearing,” the spokesperson explained.
The impact this has had on the surface has already been noticed at home games.
Chansiri also broke the news in the forum that Shea Charles had been recalled from his loan by Southampton, another deflating moment.
Defender Di’Shon Bernard described the midfielder as the “first, second and third” best player this season, a sentiment shared by supporters.
“For him to be recalled, in the position we are, with no signings so far, it kills the positivity around the club,” Oldfield says.
Rohl said in a later press conference there was a “small chance” of re-signing Charles, but it remains unlikely.
As a sign of how deeply divided Wednesday has become by it all, there are so many fan factions the Supporters’ Trust have set up an umbrella group to bring them all together.
There remain supporters who are behind Chansiri, pointing out how much money he has put into the club during a decade as owner – around £150m.
Other fans, however, blame Chansiri for operating a divide and conquer mentality to split dissenters.
It is a frustration of Bennett that no representative from the Trust is on the Supporter Engagement Panel, set up in 2021 to facilitate discussion between fans and executives.
He claims that in a recent engagement panel meeting members were told if they did not leave the umbrella group they would be expelled.
“It was stated that if any umbrella group was of a militant nature, it would not be appropriate for members of the Engagement Panel to sit within both groups for risk of confidentiality breaches and trust,” the club spokesperson said.
Why Chansiri has no interest in selling and keeps pouring millions of pounds into a club full of fans that dislike him baffles many.
Particularly when, as Bennett says, “The trust between the chairman and the supporters has completely broken down.
“I’ve always tried not to be personally critical of Chansiri. He’s put an obscene amount of money into the football club. But how he’s done it has been my bugbear and how he treats and speaks to supporters.
“He always refers to us as customers, which rubs everybody up the wrong way. He always refers to the fact he owns the club, he’s not the custodian. If you don’t like it, don’t turn up.
“He doesn’t understand fan culture and the nature of why people support a football team and how it’s embedded in a community. He hasn’t got an understanding of that at all.
“The fans were exceptionally polite and respectful. It was the top table who weren’t in some of their answers. They were very aggressive and dictatorial. They were putting people down in the audience.
“He kept asking people: do you run your own business? Do you understand cash flow problems? Very patronising, dismissive. I don’t understand why he did it. All he’s done is rile the fans up when they were asking genuine questions.”
Oldfield adds: “The forum was a car crash from start to finish. It got to a point where I was mentally exhausted listening to him. I couldn’t take the same stuff being said repeatedly. I’d heard it all before.”
And Bennett accused Chansiri of “bending the truth” and “barefaced lying”.
“Suffice to say, that is untrue,” the spokesperson said.
