Sheffield United; Either they don't know what they're doing or they do

Earlier this year, Sheffield Wednesday became the first club in the history of the EFL to finish a season with zero points. That club has now been saved, but a fresh wind is now threatening to tear through the Steel City, and this time it’s blowing straight into the faces of Sheffield United.

Things hadn’t been that great to start with, these last few years. They’d finished 9th in the Premier League in 2020 but were relegated the following year win bottom place. It took two years for them to get back, after they lost on penalties in the play-off semi-finals to Nottingham Forest, but in 2023 they were automatically promoted back as runners-up behind Burnley.

But then the wheels fell off. The 2023-24 season was a horrific one for the club. They were relegated from the Premier League in bottom place with just 16 points, having conceded a new League record of 104 goals. They haven’t return to the top-flight since.

They came close at the end of 2024-25, topping the table for five weeks in the autumn and not budging from the top two throughout the whole winter and much of the spring. The high point came at the end of March, when a 3-1 win against Coventry City took them top of the table with seven games to play. A week earlier, they’d won at Hillsborough in the return Steel City derby.

This was the point at which things started to go wrong. They won just two of those final seven games of the season and were comfortably beaten into third place by Burnley and Leeds. In the play-offs, they comfortably beat Bristol City in the semi-finals and led Sunderland 1-0 with 15 minutes of the final to play, but then two goals turned the game on its head, the second of which came five minutes into stoppage-time. Sunderland were promoted and in South Yorkshire, it all went off.

It was certainly a disappointment to miss out on that promotion, but the club’s decision to replace Chris Wilder with Ruben Selles after the play-off final was baffling. Sure enough, missing out on promotion was a huge disappointment, but setting the minimum bar for success that high is always an absurd thing to do. Third in the table and losing a play-off final in the last minute clearly warranted another season, and especially for Chris Wilder.

The decision to bring in Ruben Selles was equally mystifying, but then, the ongoing employment of Selles as the head coach is one of European football’s more perplexing mysteries. Originally hired as Ralph Hassenhuttl’s assistant at Southampton, he was given the big job at St Mary’s but then won two in 17 and was sacked.

He did pretty well at Reading, considering the financial state of the club at the time, and then just about kept Hull City in the Championship but was sacked at the end of the season anyway before being appointed at Bramall Lane. It's not the worst record in the history of football management, but what did United see in his CV which made them think, “HERE’S the man to lead us back to the promised land”? (He has since also been hired by Real Zaragosa in Spain, but was sacked from there in March.)

The answer to this question may rest in a key change in transfer policy. In December 2024, Sheffield United were sold by Prince Abdullah’s multi-club group United World for $135 million - a shade over £100 million - to COH Sports Bidco Limited, which was owned by two American investors, Helmy Eltoukhy and Steven Rosen. $41 million was paid up front, with two further payments of $47.6 million and the remaining balance of $47.4 million to follow.

The new owners were intending a “data-driven” - that’s to say, AI - approach to recruiting players from the summer of 2025 on. They'd even brought onboard a former professional poker player by the name of James Bord to assist them with this as a consultant.

The new head coach hire was a big decision. The coming 2025-26 season mattered. Since their last stay in the Premier League had only lasted for one season, they would only receive two years’ worth of parachute payments rather than three, this time, meaning that the 2025-26 season was their final attempt at promotion with that baked-in advantage over most of the rest of the division. It needed to be the right choice.

By the time that Ruben Selles was sacked on the 14th September 2025, Sheffield United had lost each of their first five League matches of the season. They had scored one goal, 14 minutes into their opening match, which ended in a 4-1 home shoeing at the hands of Bristol City. United had to go back to Chris Wilder and persuade him to return.

Fortunately, Wilder agreed to go back to the club, but such was the damage that had been done that it took until November and a 3-0 win at Sheffield Wednesday for them to pull themselves out of the bottom three. Bord, meanwhile, left to front a bid to buy Wednesday out of administration which floundered and ultimately failed over questions regarding the source of its funding.

When the return derby match was played at the end of February, United confirmed a unique double of their own. Not only had their win at Hillsborough pulled them out of the relegation places the previous November, but their 2-1 win in the return match at Bramall Lane mathematically confirmed Sheffield Wednesday’s relegation, the earliest in the entire 146-year history of the Football League.

But this didn't give United much of a boost. They won just four of remaining 13 games and finished 13th. The attempt to win promotion back to the Premier League at the second attempt, their last with parachute payments as financial support, had failed. They hadn't even come close.

There had been mutterings of a further dispute between Prince Abdullah and COH Sports towards the end of last season, and it turned out to be very worrying news indeed. The second instalment of the money due for the sale of the club had been paid, but it had been received late, while the third instalment hadn’t been paid at all.

According to Abdullah's public statement on the matter, attempts to contact the owners had been stonewalled, leaving him with little choice. The Sheffield Star reported the date of the winding-up petition hearing at the end of July. And now it’s been granted by a business court in London. On the 19th August 2026, COH Sports was liquidated. Much as Sheffield United's team had acted at the start of the season, they didn't offer a defence.

But by this time, COH Sports weren’t technically the owners of Sheffield United Football Club. On the 22nd June, a “board update” reported that shares in the club had been transferred to a company called 1919 Partners which, conveniently enough, wasn’t a wholly-owned subsidiary of COH Sports.

But this only makes matters even more complex. Unsurprisingly, moving assets out of businesses that are about to find themselves on the receiving end of recovery action tends to be frowned upon. Under insolvency law, such transfers can be considered misfeasance and can be reversed or even considered a reason for disqualification from acting as a director.

It’s being reported that the club are at risk of a twelve-point deduction from the EFL. There’s every possibility that this could be considered an ‘insolvency event’ on the part of the club itself. It’s not Sheffield United Football Club who owe this money, but it could yet be they who end up paying a heavy price.

Stranger still has been the club’s complete inertia over it all. A short statement was released, reading:

Sheffield United Football Club is aware of today’s hearing at the High Court. This is a matter between the current owners and former owner.

The Football Club is in contact with the EFL and the day-to-day operations at Sheffield United are unaffected.

This followed a message earlier this week which even less helpfully read:

We are disappointed Prince Abdullah is trying to hurt the club and its supporters with publicity stunts.

The deal between sophisticated parties in 2024 was well advised by his financial advisors. Sheffield United is financially healthy, unlike under Prince Abdullah when the club incurred a points deduction for missing payments to football creditors.

Nonetheless Helmy and Rosen invited Abdullah to re-invest in the club and join the ownership of Sheffield United and to help use his skills to support our promotion efforts.

Helmy and Steve are focused on the sustainability of the club and the season ahead.

So… “Sheffield United is financially healthy, unlike under Prince Abdullah” in one paragraph, and then “Helmy and Rosen invited Abdullah to re-invest in the club and join the ownership of Sheffield United and to help use his skills to support our promotion efforts” in the very next one? Have they taken leave of their goddam senses? A winding-up order has been granted. COH Sports are being liquidated. This matters.

In case it isn’t clear, it doesn’t seem as though Prince Abdullah isn’t in the slightest bit interested in “using his skills to support their promotion efforts”, and given their catastrophic 2025 transfer window sacking Chris Wilder, hiring Ruben Selles, sacking Ruben Selles, re-hiring Chris Wilder, paying one of the three instalments due for sale of the club late, and then not paying the final one at all, few would blame him. He wants paying, he’s legally owed, and the court has agreed it.

COH didn’t even enter a defence, and it’s not difficult to see how transferring a business worth tens - quite easily hundreds - of millions of pounds at this sort of time could raise an eyebrow or two at court. So far as the legal system is concerned, COH Sports owe Prince Abdullah thirty-five million quid, and the receiver’s job will be to ensure that he, well, receives it.

You can’t just transfer the shares in a business elsewhere like that, knowing that a winding-up petition is coming. Any assets disposed of within the last six months to a year will come in for extra scrutiny from the insolvency practitioner concerned. This transfer seems to have happened just over two months before the liquidation. It will be interesting to hear what the precise explanation for the transfer of this not-insubstantial asset is.

As for that dreaded points deduction, well, that's down to the EFL to decide. They have done before. Just over 17 years ago, when Southampton's holding company went into administration (for the record, their chairman at the time was one Rupert Lowe; yes, that one), they claimed that they shouldn't be docked points because it wasn't strictly speaking them who had entered administration, but the League decided that, as a wholly owned subsidiary, they were one and the same - “inextricably linked as one economic entity”, as they put it at the time - and docked them anyway.

The Ashes of COH Sports will argue that aha, Sheffield United are no longer owned by our blazing crater so this is different, but whether the EFL buy that or not is their decision, and their word - effectively literally, with the backing of the IFR - is law. There are solid grounds to believe that they might consider the June transfer of shares to be an irrelevance in view of the broader situation. On the pitch, meanwhile, Sheffield United started their 2026-27 season with a insipid goalless draw against Birmingham City.

It seems clear that the final tranche of the amount payable for the club has to be paid, and the club have offered no obvious explanation as to why it shouldn't or hasn't been. And the upshot of all this is that United's season is being overshadowed after just one match by boardroom chicanery in which the best interests of the football club itself don't seem to be very high on the agenda. This sort of thing seems to have become a pretty common theme in recent years, when it comes to running football clubs in Sheffield.