Danny Röhl’s Sheffield Wednesday deal is huge – and not just for the reasons you might think

Genuine optimism isn’t something that Wednesdayites have been allowed too much of in recent years. We’ve done blind optimism, optimism for the sake of it, but too often the actual real, logical sense of optimism has been few and far between.

But with Röhl at the helm, and Daddy Cool reverberating around our heads, it feels like Wednesday fans have reason to be excited about what could lie ahead for their football club – one that has dallied about the doldrums for far too long.

Before anyone says it, no, I’m not jumping the gun. I’m not saying that the tying down of Wednesday’s new German Messiah is any sort of guarantee that a Premier League return is on the cards. But what I am saying is that the chances of the Owls being on the path towards that goal are far better with him steering the ship.

Röhl signing is important because it means that he’s staying, but it’s also so much bigger than him. The way you hear those around him talk about him speaks volumes, whether that be coaches, club staff or players – to say that he’s highly-rated would be a gross understatement.

So by committing his future to Hillsborough, he could well have tipped over the vital first domino. Wednesday stand a better chance of keeping those they’ve offered new deals to with Danny at the wheel, they stand a better chance of bringing back those loan players that were so vital to their great escape, they stand a better chance of attracting the sort of players that can achieve the top ten finish that he’s already spoken into the universe. Now we wait for the next dominos to fall.

There were fears of course that his situation would rumble on over the summer, that he’d be linked with every club under the sun as he showcased his expertise during Euro 2024 on ITV, but by sorting it before May has even come to an end Dejphon Chansiri has managed to draw a big blue and white line underneath the topic. He’s going nowhere.

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So now the real work begins, for Röhl it’s about building a squad – and he wants to do that quickly – but there is also work to be done off the field, too. Improvements and renovations at Middlewood Road are underway, preseason plans are almost finalised, and the club feels eerily like one that has got a real strategy in place for how the immediate future might look.

As I said previously, we have to wait and see where we’re at in a few weeks’ time, where we’re at the when the transfer window closes, but what is absolutely beyond doubt is that the first piece of the puzzle has been laid down – and it’s in the shape of a tall German man punching the air in an SWFC tracksuit.