Guardascione, Walton Penner and Fat Vegetables - Inside the madness of Sheffield Wednesday's crazy year
This weekend marks a year since Sheffield Wednesday were moved out of the hands of Dejphon Chansiri.
A year on from Sheffield Wednesday entering administration, the story of Dejphon Chansiri’s crumbling ownership of the club is one perhaps best told in long-form, in a book or screenplay.
The controversial Thai put the very existence of the club into question and the prizing of it from his hands was a long and arduous process. Time has passed and Wednesday look to be on the right footing with Arise, the US consortium that ultimately took the club on in a second round of bidding.
Ahead of Saturday’s anniversary of ‘Administration Day’, we take a look at some of the tidbits you might not have known - which include tales that once again highlight the madness that was administration, decline and Chansiri’s Wednesday.
Bord’s oddly-named bid vehicle
With three bids received from clearly viable candidates on the deadline day for a first round of bids before Christmas, staff at Begbies Traynor thought that stage of the process was heading towards a simple conclusion. Late on, they received a fourth bid from a consortium that called themselves ‘The Fat Vegetables’.
It transpired that the group was the one led by James Bord, whose interest in acquiring the club had been reported in the national media a week or so before. The consortium, which Bord was a director of alongside Felix Romer and Alsharif Faisal Bin Jamil, later registered a special purpose vehicle company under the more sensibly-named Trelights Pebble Ltd.
That late £47.5m bid, not revealed until they pulled out of their preferred bidder status in February, blew the others out of the water. It left administrators in a position that they felt they had to accept the offer on the basis there was a chance the bid would pass vetting checks - and was so much larger than its rival bids that it could have opened them up to a legal challenge. That vetting process proved to be far from easy and in February, not long after they were instructed to send further tranches of information by the IFR, they withdrew their bid citing the cost of reviving Hillsborough stadium.
A bizarre discovery
Not long after Chansiri had been ousted, explorations of the stadium and its true assets were had. One such discovery saw a huge storage room on the second floor opened up to find it packed floor-to-ceiling with cardboard boxes of old unsold kit and merchandise.
The boxes contained tens of thousands of Wednesday items, mainly replica shirts from across Chansiri’s decade with the club, with sources suggesting they could have easily been sold at a heavy discount to raise hundreds of thousands of pounds. It’s understood that this was put to the former Owls chairman as an idea on a number of occasions but that he refused to sell retail items below what it had cost the club to purchase. The bulk of the items have since been sold to online sellers, it’s believed.
The broken nature of basic business practices are by now well-known, with employees at the club having grown tired of their efforts to work with Chansiri methods some years earlier. Among the matters overlooked was adequate attention to GDPR laws, tightened in the years before. Wednesday’s data protection officer at the time administration came to pass was a early-20s youngster with absolutely no specialism in the field. Administrators outsourced their data protection to an individual with vast previous experience of managing such things within football clubs. Some of the computers used by staff were older than some of the staff themselves.
Where did the Walton Penner rumours come from?
One constant rumour that bubbled up during the administration process was that there was interest in buying the club from the Walton Penner family, a prominent US business, philanthropic and sports ownership family closely tied to the Walmart fortune. The family are the co-owners of major NFL franchise Denver Broncos. It’s understood that there was never any approach made by the family for Wednesday.
Multiple sources have indicated to The Star that the rumour may well have been one misconstrued over time. Sometime in late 2024 or early 2025, it’s believed that with the assistance of some Wednesday-supporting professionals, a US corporate finance team approached Chansiri and offered an attempt to stimulate interest in the club for a fee that could scale £100m. That firm counted the Broncos investors among their clients.
The approach came at a time when the Owls were on the fringes of the play-off places under Danny Röhl at that time. Chansiri is believed to have rejected the offer - and stands to walk away from the club with nothing.
Fears over vital match
The home clash against Norwich City on November 5 had been outlined as an important one. A number of interested parties had been invited to the game and the hope was that Wednesdayites would arrive in their numbers and bring the sort of fandom and atmosphere that would be attractive to a prospective buying party.
The Owls drew 1-1 with Barry Bannan scoring a thunderbolt from distance, though there was at one stage some level of fear that the game wouldn’t go ahead. An electrical problem in the North Stand cut off power to that end of the ground including the Megastore and had it not been fixed, there may well have been problems in getting the game on for what was a showpiece evening people had flown from across the world to attend.
Thankfully, the problem was sorted, the match did go ahead and the rest is history. Among the interested parties present was one Mr David Storch, who later stated it as an experience that sealed his ambition to become the club’s owner.
What the hell happened with Guardascione?
Ah, Francesco Guardascione. The botched Italian job took place some months before administration came into effect and despite social media conspiracy theories was real - to an extent.
It’s understood that in July 2025, one of Chansiri’s UK legal advisors approached him with an offer to buy Sheffield Wednesday from a consortium headed by the controversial Italian businessman whose reputation rather proceeded him. A deal had been agreed in principle, The Star and other outlets reported as such and Chansiri was understood to be cockahoop with what he felt to be an excellent price - though a genuine proof of funds hadn’t even been provided.
It never felt right and within a week it had crumbled, images taken from a heads of terms document had made their way onto social media and the shambles of a Chansiri sale of Sheffield Wednesday was laid bare. It transpired that the money was never truly there and that the ‘consortium’ were time wasters. It would take nearly a year for the club to be moved into new hands.