The night Dejphon Chansiri soured the atmosphere - and later tried to have me banned from Sheffield Wednesday
“You say I’m a dictator!”
The angry words are from Dejphon Chansiri. The time is late 2017. The place is a Thai restaurant in Sheffield. The recipient is me!
This is the latest of several informal gatherings with local media. The previously cordial atmosphere evaporated that night.
It was a sign that Sheffield Wednesday’s owner could not take even the mildest criticism, which in my case involved an article offering “friendly advice” about allowing football professionals to call the shots.
In fact, I hadn’t called him a dictator (not then), only “hands on.” But had he said “you THINK I’m a dictator” he’d have got me!
This indelible memory is by way of highlighting the sort of owner Wednesday must NOT have in future, no matter how much cash they bring. Chansiri qualified in that regard but blew it through sheer arrogance, pig-headedness & ultimately stupidity.
It’s right that the club’s administrators, including an Owls fan in Kris Wigfield, are stressing that money is not the only criteria amid major interest.
Flashbacks to Chansiri here are for this one week only. Without apology as I’m led to believe he considered imposing a ban on yours truly (among others) on multiple occasions.
So I should record how I replied to Chansiri that night: “Suppose I somehow came to run your family’s tuna business - would I be the right person to decide which oceans to fish and which vessels to send out?”
He had no real answer to that, beyond appearing to question who he could trust. And yet had he heeded good advice to that effect from copious well-meaning sources, in and out of football, his ship would not have run aground.
Lately it was suspected he wished, out of grievance, to sink it with all souls aboard. Thankfully Chansiri will go down and Wednesday sail on, even though he did stop just short of a shipwreck in the end.
To quote a word used about the sham-looking and shambolic “process of selling” the club, Chansiri was “unique.”
Uniquely stubborn, difficult and at times incomprehensible. Yet committed in his own way. I’m certain no-one in his orbit has ever come across anybody quite like him.
You can’t rationalise things that are beyond reason. Like the demoralising dressing down he was said to have inflicted on a shocked dressing room (following the ending of a record unbeaten run) that almost derailed the promotion of 2023.
This is a man who, as one of Chansiri’s associates told me on his unveiling as Owls’ owner, delights in doing the unexpected.
It was taken as a strength at the time along with his financial muscle. Ten years on, it is the biggest single, self-styled reason for a club having to be further sabotaged in order to be rescued by its own fans.
All of which doesn’t make any sense for any of us in “the real world.” And you don’t even have to live in Chansiri’s, of wealth and privilege, to see the folly of such a self-destruction being beyond even cultural differences.
Any suitable new owner has to grasp, as Chansiri never did, that “customers” are the opposite of a subservient part of a business; that employees need to be empowered and appreciated.
This has to be at the heart of the next regime, whoever wins control from what’s shaping as a long queue. Praise be to the hugely effective protest campaign by the Wednesday Supporters Trust and genuine thoughts for the local businesses blighted by administration.
Also I think it’s now about recognising that improving the infrastructure and day-to-day operation has to come before buying a way back to the club’s more accustomed status.
If this is communicated properly, as I’m sure it will be, supporters will understand and rally round as they’re doing already in huge numbers. They just want a club that behaves in a way they can be proud of again.