Dejphon Chansiri set the tone for Sheffield Wednesday chaos - now he must change or sell up

Owners don’t kick a ball. They don’t pick teams either and even Dejphon Chansiri’s harshest critics couldn’t accuse him of that. Or that he doesn’t care. He does, his life and not just his money seemingly invested in Hillsborough. But owners do set the tone and template for a club. They do present it to the world, sometimes, as in this case, with their name emblazoned all over it.

So when people seek a reason for Sheffield Wednesday’s catastrophic season they can only look in only one place. The tone Chansiri has set, certainly since last summer and in periods before, appears to be consistently one of chaos.

The template he has set comes across as one of micro-management, of personally taking all decisions, not just major ones. It follows that he must take full responsibility for his club’s current plight.

In fairness, I don’t think he would deny that. But he also seems not to have learned from nine years of what his decision-making, and apparent lack of delegation, has produced. Therefore, the oft-repeated opinion of this column is a constant. Chansiri must either change, radically (including re-financing a club on which he has wasted so much of his money), or he must sell up.

No middle course.  It’s an honest considered opinion. Wednesday stay up, Danny Rohl gets the credit. Go down, Chansiri gets the blame. Unfair or not, that’s the way it is. We could (again) list the things that don’t add up. There’s no point - we all know what they are.

But the most recently topical one, after a lack of productive trading in January, bears repeating. I don’t think, for his own good, Chansiri should be anywhere near a transfer window. He should have a chief executive and/ or head of football, set the financial limits and leave it to them in tandem with the manager.

As for the Duncan McGuire saga, if the club had £2m available (albeit apparently tabled over a multi-year structure), then you’d expect the MLS striker to have been only one name on a hit list. No others emerged, publicly anyway, whether sought or not.

Ok, for all his difficulties, Rohl might be a touch disappointed with his overall record. Certainly, he and the players must bear blame for an abject 4-0 loss at relegation rivals Huddersfield. But, while he was a good appointment by Chansiri after the managerial mayhem that preceded it, the climate was set by the chairman - and it was stormy. Rohl, quite rightly, is being strongly backed by fans because he has shown he can make some sense of the nonsense. Performances generally have improved. But it’s reasonable to ask whether he or any other manager could make a success of the Owls job under current conditions.