A year ago this weekend, Sheffield Wednesday stopped belonging to Dejphon Chansiri. On 24 October 2025, Begbies Traynor were appointed administrators. It's easy to forget how close we came to having no club at all. Two days earlier, Hillsborough had been close to empty for Middlesbrough. Just over 7,000 turned up as supporters boycotted the game, while the club worked through six registration embargoes, unpaid wages and an HMRC bill. Earlier that month we'd been beaten 5-0 at home by Coventry after a protest on the pitch. No one in that half-empty ground knew if there would be a Wednesday to support by Christmas.
Twelve months later, we're seventh in League One with a game in hand. We put five past AFC Wimbledon on Saturday and then lost meekly at Notts County on Tuesday, which tells you most of what you need to know about the season so far. But the ground has hot water. A year ago, neither a promotion race nor working showers was a given.
It's been some year, and not just at Hillsborough.
The longest winter
Administration didn't end the pain, it formalised it. The EFL took 12 points straight away and another six in December for payment breaches, leaving Chansiri banned from running an EFL club for three years. The sale process lurched through Mike Ashley's interest, a preferred bidder that never got over the line, and a £47.8m bid that was withdrawn in late February.
The wider world wasn't exactly calm either. November took reggae great Jimmy Cliff, and in December Hollywood lost Rob Reiner, the man behind Stand by Me, When Harry Met Sally and This Is Spinal Tap. The new year opened with US forces capturing Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. In January, Catherine O'Hara, forever Kevin's mum in Home Alone, died at 71. In February, Robert Duvall followed at 95.
Amp. goes to 11 (This is Spinal Tap)
Closer to home, January brought one of the wettest months on record, three named storms and the sea wall collapse at Dawlish. Robert Jenrick and Suella Braverman left the Conservatives for Reform. On 19 February, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested over his links to Jeffrey Epstein, a sentence nobody would have believed a few years ago. Days later, Peter Mandelson was arrested as well. At the end of the month, US and Israeli strikes on Iran killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and energy bills and mortgage rates here jumped as a result.
On the pitch, Henrik Pedersen kept a stripped-back squad turning up every week, which deserves more credit than it will ever get. Liam Palmer captained the side through the worst of it. Barry Bannan was sold to Millwall in January. Relegation came on 22 February with a derby defeat to United. It was the earliest any club has gone down in EFL history, and we finished the season on zero points. Those are numbers we'd rather not remember, but we should.
The turn came in March, when Arise Capital Partners, led by David Storch with his son Michael and Tom Costin, became preferred bidder. In April, the EFL said whoever bought the club would start League One on minus 15. By the time the takeover completed at the start of May, that deduction was gone.
2 May
Anyone who was there won't need reminding. Almost 34,000 inside Hillsborough, the new owners walking onto the pitch before kick-off, and a 2-1 win over West Brom, our first home league win of the season. In football terms it meant nothing. In every other sense it meant everything.
Storch made promises that sounded almost comically small for a club of our size: hot water, decent food, better merchandise, Wi-Fi that works. Standing beside him was David Bruce, the former Sunderland chief business officer brought in as CEO.
A week later, Labour took a hammering in the May elections. That started the end of Keir Starmer's time in Downing Street. He announced his resignation on 22 June, and by 20 July, Andy Burnham, back in Parliament through the Makerfield by-election, was Prime Minister. That's a Greater Manchester mayor in Number 10, and you'd have got long odds on it a year ago.
Lifting the stones
Bruce marked the anniversary this week with an interview with the PA news agency, and it's the most revealing thing anyone at the club has said since the takeover.
The headline figure is roughly £11m spent on the stadium and training ground since May. What stays with you is what that money went on. Stands and roofs have been repaired so fans aren't rained on. New water tanks and pipework now run around the whole stadium, because until recently the ground couldn't reliably flush toilets in the second half or give every player a warm shower. Bruce described it as lifting a stone and finding another problem underneath, then another, and he made the point that the previous regime either never lifted the stone or put it straight back down.
None of it earns the club a penny, as he admitted himself. But that's exactly why it tells us something about the people now in charge. Owners chasing a quick flip don't spend millions on plumbing.
The changes go beyond bricks and pipes. Umbro are back on the shirts, replacing Macron, with Fibrely on the front, and the third kit sold out within days in September. The 1867 Lounge has been redeveloped too. These are small things, but they're the signs of a club being run properly again. More importantly, supporters now have a seat at the table, in the most literal sense. Trust chair James Silverwood has been offered an unpaid seat on the club board, something no Wednesday board has ever done before. The new Fan Advisory Board meets for the first time on 3 November. A year after fans were boycotting matches to save the club, they're being invited into the boardroom.
While Hillsborough was getting new pipes, the rest of the world was moving at a pace that's hard to keep up with, especially in tech. ChatGPT started showing adverts. Elon Musk became the world's first trillionaire when SpaceX went public. In July, OpenAI disclosed what it called the first known cyberattack carried out on its own by an AI agent. Whatever you make of AI, it's gone from a novelty to front-page news in the time it took us to get the toilets working.
A team again, sort of
The football side was rebuilt almost from nothing. Simon Wilson arrived from Stockport as sporting director. Pedersen stayed, and twelve permanent signings came in over the summer. Some familiar faces went the other way. Pierce Charles, whose saves were one of the few things that kept last season bearable, completed his move to Manchester City, and it felt like the closing chapter of the survival year. The signing that meant the most was Bannan. Storch later revealed the two had been in touch since December, before Arise had even won the club, and that Bannan had wanted to come home as soon as it was clear the takeover would happen. Season ticket sales broke the club record before a ball was kicked.
Spain beat Argentina in extra time to win the World Cup in July. It was a summer that took a heavy toll on the people we grew up with. Bonnie Tyler died in July. Then, on 25 August, we lost both Dolly Parton and Tim Curry on the same day, and anyone who ever sang "Jolene" at a wedding or did the Time Warp at a student night felt it. Hollywood lost Chuck Norris back in March, and earlier this month Eva Marie Saint died at 102.
On paper the season has started well. We beat Bromley 7-2, Jamal Lowe was League One's Player of the Month for August, and Yan Valery's winner at Peterborough sent us top of the table in mid-September. We're still seventh with games in hand. Look past the table, though, and it's far less convincing. The football has too often been slow, sideways and short of ideas. Too many of our points have come from penalties, own goals and late scrambles rather than chances we've made ourselves. Hillsborough has been a particular problem: take out Bromley, and we went three home league games without scoring until Wimbledon. The 98th-minute penalty at Huddersfield rescued a point we hadn't earned, and Tuesday at Meadow Lane was as bad as anything we've seen this season. Notts County had one league win all year, and we didn't manage a single shot on target against them.
Luck hasn't helped. Tyler Onyango ruptured his ACL on his debut, and Louie Barry, our brightest spark in the opening weeks, hasn't played since Wycombe. Wimbledon was the first time we'd scored at home without him. Even so, that's why the debate about Pedersen has grown so loud, so quickly. It's a strange turn when you remember the owners improved his terms during that strong start in September. He kept this club going when it had 15 senior players and no money, and that goodwill shouldn't be forgotten. But last season was about survival, and this one is about expectation. A squad this expensive, playing in a league this weak, should be doing more than grinding out results it doesn't always deserve. There's plenty to like about the squad, from Gray's directness to Keillor-Dunn's form and Cooper at the back. What we haven't seen yet is a team that consistently plays like one.
Bumpy, but fun
Storch has talked about getting back to the Championship within a couple of years, and Bruce went further this week. He said Wednesday were always a top-10 club in this country and can be again. Wilson apparently called us the original sleeping giant in his job interview. It's hard to argue.
What we like is that nobody is pretending the climb will be smooth. Bruce was refreshingly honest about it: "it's going to be bumpy, but it's going to be fun as hell." He also pointed out that English football tends to keep quiet until a project is finished, while our American owners want to talk about the journey from day one. After years of silence and excuses from the top of this club, we'll take some over-sharing.
We're getting a taste of the bumps already. Meadow Lane ended the unbeaten run, left us without Slattery and Jamal Lowe for Doncaster, and turned the noise around the manager up another notch. The bigger tests will come with a proper bad run, a January window where we can't get the deal we want, and the moments when patience is genuinely needed. After the last few years, nothing should be taken on trust. But one year on, the gap between where we were and where we are is huge.
In 365 days the country has changed Prime Minister, a royal has been arrested, a war has reshaped the Middle East, and a machine has hacked a company on its own. Through all of that, the thing that's changed most for us is that we have a football club again.
That's worth holding on to the next time a Tuesday night in Nottingham leaves us fuming. The frustration is real, and it's earned. We've watched enough flat, sideways football this season to know this side has more in it, and we're right to expect it. But a year ago the arguments were about whether the wages would be paid, whether the North Stand would open, and whether there'd be a club left to argue about. We were organising boycotts and protests outside embassies. Now we're debating formations, whether Bannan should start, and if Pedersen is the man to take us up.
We'll take that trade every single time.
Nobody knows exactly how this season ends, or whether the manager will still be here when it does. There'll be more bad nights, more phone-ins and more polls on X. But for the first time in years, the people running Sheffield Wednesday are fixing the roofs, inviting fans into the boardroom, and talking openly about where we're going. Whatever the future holds, it finally feels like one worth looking forward to.
A year ago we were wondering if Sheffield Wednesday would survive. Now we're arguing about the starting XI for Doncaster. That's how football is supposed to be. Up the Owls.
Sources: PA news agency interview with David Bruce, via The Star and Yorkshire Post; TalkSport; NPR; CNN; Wikipedia.
Main Article Image Credit: Yorkshire Post