The joke around Sheffield Wednesday, or one of those that writes itself, is that two months into the season, the club have accrued more statements from their owner than they have league points. The cogs of crisis are turning at Hillsborough and not many are as riveting as the wait to see what Dejphon Chansiri says next, like the wait to see which Jenga block Elon Musk pulls from X, the website formerly known as Twitter.
Chansiri’s last effort, published on Wednesday’s website a fortnight ago, was textbook: 1,466 words long, confrontational and gung-ho, ending with a threat to withdraw his funding and a suggestion that supporters criticising him pay the club’s way themselves. For all the flaws of Chansiri’s stewardship, he scores well on a metric used to analyse owners like him; the art of the outlandish club statement, launched in the face of public exasperation. On that front, Chansiri is on a roll.
The tradition is as old as Hillsborough itself and Wednesday’s all-powerful chairman seems to have mastered it. There is a knack to statements like his, a basic list of core aspects which are necessary to achieve the intended tranche of attention and headlines. Nobody publishes a deep, 1,466-word missive in the hope that few people bother to read it. This is an owner’s chance to drag the public by the nose, as fans sit, stare and try to find the words themselves.
But what differentiates a fast-and-free statement from the plain, run-of-the-mill press releases that clubs deal in every day? How best to cross the line between corporate-speak and bewildering prose?
The length of Chansiri’s most recent state-of-the-union address was relevant because in these moments, length matters. And length is often what separates statements that are supposed to rock the boat from those a club would rather not write, or are forced into publishing with cattle prods.
For an example of the latter, go back to February 2014 and the day after Brian McDermott was sacked as Leeds United manager, only to be reinstated amid the biggest ownership shambles Elland Road has seen (and that is some stiff competition). McDermott was caught in the crossfire of Massimo Cellino’s proposed takeover of GFH, the Bahraini bank which pretended to run Leeds for 13 months. Cellino, thinking the deal was done and the club were his, sacked McDermott instantly, but it transpired very quickly that he had no authority to dismiss anyone until the EFL approved his buy-out.
For the best part of 24 hours following McDermott’s dismissal, Leeds said nothing. Then, with the fanbase in riot mode, GFH chose the second half of a 5-1 win over Huddersfield Town as the perfect moment to clarify matters by issuing a statement which read, in full: “The club would like to make it clear that Brian McDermott remains our first-team manager. He has not been dismissed from his post as has been suggested and we look forward to him continuing in his role with us in taking Leeds United forwards.”
McDermott, who was absent from the Huddersfield game, was not aware that the update was coming. GFH had to be pushed into authorising it. This was an ownership statement concocted under duress, ridiculous for its nothing-to-see-here nature and the thousands of questions it left unanswered.
But as a rule, choice statements have to be long; so long that supporters feel compelled to read them because the longer the text, the more potential for trolling and PR disasters in them. Take the 1,600 words from the mouth of Mike Ashley in 2008 when he promised to bow to pressure and sell Newcastle United (13 years before he actually did so!).
What Newcastle’s support were crying out for, evidently, were Ashley’s memories of Mexico ’86 and Diego Maradona. They absolutely wanted to read Ashley’s insistence that he “bought Newcastle because I love football” and to see the owner of a club going nowhere remark that “this is not fantasy football”. “You don’t need to demonstrate against me again,” Ashley said, which proved to be the least prescient comment ever in hindsight. Newcastle’s statements in that era, some regarded as thoroughly tone-deaf, could make an article in themselves.
Tone is as crucial as length. The content has to be spiky and at least slightly ludicrous, otherwise, readers will get bored and give up halfway through.
No fan is sitting down to read a bland statement that has passed through PR filters or communications departments and been stripped of the juice. Rambling is fine, as rambling adds to the theatre and the sense of a loss of control. Better still, it has to read as if it has been written in person; as if the club’s owner was sat at a laptop, glugging vodka from the bottle, smashing the keyboard to bits. And above all, do not allow anyone to interfere.
Ken Bates’ programme notes when he owned Leeds were almost the precursor to today’s online outbursts, a unique and maddening stream of consciousness in which it was not unusual to find scores being settled or dissenting fans being described as morons. Bates’ wife, Suzannah, would help him put his column together. Generally speaking, staff at the club knew better than to edit them.
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That, though, is essential; the personal touch which removes any doubt that a statement has landed uncensored.
Up at Heart of Midlothian in Scotland, once the domain of Lithuanian businessman and submarine owner Vladimir Romanov, that was how it was whenever he decided to have a pop. Where Romanov differed from many out-there owners was that his outbursts — weird, wonderful and cryptic — tended to be a dig at the Scottish football authorities and referees rather than Hearts’ own support.
Some would be addressed to no one in particular and would contain such beauties as “it is not without your help that traitors were presented as heroes, thus showing the road to children for betrayal” and “I beg you Mowgli, take the monkeys back to the safari park!”. They would refer to “the mafia” and “maniacs”, with Romanov’s hackles rising. A nonplussed SPL spokesman responded to one of his statements by saying: “We’ll wait to hear back from Hearts. The SPL board will take it from there.”
Paul Kiddie worked in the communications department at the Edinburgh club towards the end of Romanov’s time as majority shareholder. “You got no warning of these things coming,” Kiddie told The Athletic. “It wasn’t like you got a phone call from Lithuania saying, ‘I was thinking of writing this, what do you think?’. You didn’t actually know if or when he was thinking of putting a statement together. He just did it. They’d appear from nowhere and you were told: ‘Publish this straight away, as it is’. That’s what we did.
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“I couldn’t tell you who actually wrote them. It (the writing) sounded like him, and it might well have been him, but who knows? It was impossible to guide the local journalists because I couldn’t explain what the statements were about. Sometimes you got the gist of it. You could guess what or who he was getting at. But even then you were in the dark. I’d stick a statement out, I’d get phone calls asking what it meant and all I could say was, ‘I have no idea’.”
A signature on a statement is fairly fundamental, making it clear that this is coming from the person at the top and not just a generic broadcast, but unsigned statements are another trick up the sleeve: the annoyance factor of a message which is attributed to no one and therefore apportions no direct responsibility.
Newcastle’s announcement of Chris Hughton as manager in 2009 concluded with whoever wrote it casually inviting offers for stadium naming rights (“moving forward off the pitch,” you know?). Hello to the Sports Direct Arena. Leeds fell foul of the same thing at the end of last season, issuing an unattributed apology for relegation. What the crowd wanted was an apology direct from Leeds’ then owner, Andrea Radrizzani. The internal suggestion of a longer, more human statement had been kiboshed. It could almost be said that if the intention is to say nothing, saying nothing would be better.
And, lastly, if you’re brave enough, be reckless. Make comments that cannot be brushed over.
Hearts won the Scottish Cup in 2006. A few months later, Romanov came calling with some copy for the club’s website, referring to the officiating during their run to the final. “Last season, you didn’t manage to protect the Scottish Cup and gave it to Hearts, despite all the referees’ efforts and intrigues,” he wrote. The Scottish Football Association took a dim view and arranged a disciplinary hearing that Romanov did not bother to attend.
The £10,000 fine levied against Hearts was not far off £500 a word.
(Top photo: Getty Images; design: Sam Richardson)
