Sheffield Wednesday’s crisis has hit a new low with news that the club will ‘imminently’ be served with a winding-up petition over an unpaid tax bill.
The Championship club are already under five separate EFL embargoes after they failed to pay wages on time in five of the past seven months, with fans staging several protests against owner Dejphon Chansiri.
And now it has emerged Wednesday are set to be served with a winding-up petition – a formal court application to force a company into compulsory liquidation – with BBC Sport reporting the club owe HMRC £1 million.
How would other Championship clubs be affected if Sheffield Wednesday are expelled?
Wednesday fans have been hit with repeated bad news since it emerged that the club had failed to pay wages on time in March.
Manager Danny Rohl left in July, when the Owls were unable to sign players for the new season, with assistant Henrik Pedersen taking over a skeleton squad that has exceeded expectations simply by eking out six points from their first nine games of the Championship campaign.
Wednesday’s solitary win this season was a 2-0 victory at Portsmouth last month, while they have also claimed creditable draws away to Wrexham and Birmingham City, and at home against Queens Park Rangers. They even beat Bolton Wanderers and Premier League Leeds United in the Carabao Cup, both on penalties, before exiting to League Two Grimsby Town.
It means that if the worst happened and the Owls were expelled from the league, it would have a knock-on effect for the rest of the division.
EFL regulations state that if this happens during the regular season the club’s ‘playing record shall be expunged’, meaning their results up to that point would be removed from the record.
As things stand, that would see Wrexham, Birmingham and QPR all lose a point, while the five teams to beat Wednesday this season – Leicester City, Stoke City, Swansea City, Bristol City and Coventry City – would have three deducted from their total.
In a league as competitive as the Championship, that can make a big difference – demonstrated by the fact that if you deducted points won against Wednesday from the current table, Leicester would fall from third to eighth and Bristol City from 10th to 16th.
EFL rules also state the number of relegation places from a league will be reduced by the number of clubs that are expelled during the season – so if Wednesday cannot complete the campaign, only two teams would go down, rather than three. The two clubs currently occupying the other Championship relegation places are Oxford United and Sheffield United.
The regulations add that the number of relegation places in League One would then be reduced from four to three to ensure there are 24 clubs in that division the following season.
League Two would keep its two relegation places, unless the EFL Board decided otherwise – which happened in the Covid-disrupted 2019-20 season when Stevenage finished 23rd on points per game but were granted a reprieve following Bury’s expulsion from League One.
If two teams are relegated from League Two, the EFL Board has the power to promote an extra club to the division to restore the number of teams across the Championship, League One and League Two to 72.
Of course, the hope is that none of this comes to pass. The imminent winding-up petition should put pressure on Chansiri to sell Wednesday and although the club still could be put into administration and incur a points deduction if the petition is thrown out, it would finally mean the end is in sight for his controversial tenure at Hillsborough.
