Blue Steel: Could Sheffield Be Heading for a Double Championship Relegation?

Football has a special place in its heart for inter-city rivalries.

Liverpool vs Everton. Rangers vs Celtic. AC Milan vs Inter Milan. Lazio vs Roma. Real Madrid vs Atletico Madrid. 

But sometimes, two clubs from the same city share a kinship; often, a brotherhood of misery. Which brings us nicely to Sheffield, the Steel City that has lost much of its shine so far during the 2025/26 season.

For Sheffield Wednesday, it’s the perils of a dodgy owner; a man who has seemingly given up on the club, with no pause to consider the ramifications of effectively pulling all of their money out and leaving the staff and players to fend for themselves.

For Sheffield United, it was the catastrophic decision to sack Chris Wilder at the end of the last campaign and replace him with Ruben Selles. By the end of September, Selles was gone and Wilder was back… but it’s going to take some time for the Blades to sharpen up.

At the time of writing, both Sheffield clubs are in the relegation zone in the Championship. So could the unthinkable happen: both Wednesday and United being demoted in the same season?

Wednesday Woes

If you or I didn’t get paid in our jobs, we’d probably stop going into work until the situation is rectified.

So you have to give tremendous credit for the loyalty of Sheffield Wednesday’s players, who continue to turn up for training despite not knowing if they’re going to be paid one month to the next.

All told, their wages were delayed, or not paid at all, in five of the first eight months of 2025, with reports suggesting that September’s payments could also be left unpaid… the players are now threatening strike action.

One man is responsible. Dejphon Chansiri bankrolled some early successes when taking over the Owls back in 2015, but his love affair has since turned sour, to the point that he barely has any connection to the club at all, despite being the owner.

Chansiri, bizarrely, is blocking the path of any party that wishes to purchase the club from him by setting a guide price of £100 million, which would see any interested buyer acquire a skeleton squad of players and a crumbling stadium.

So, there’s a Mexican stand-off at play: the backdrop against which the Wednesday players are trying their hearts out in a bid to keep the ship afloat.

And they’re putting in a decent fight, too. A point earned at big spending Birmingham City followed an excellent win at Portsmouth, and while the Owls nevertheless find themselves in the relegation zone, it’s only on goal difference. 

The issue, perhaps, is their home form, which coincides with some of the most vociferous protests against Chansiri. Wednesday took just one point from the available 12 in their first four home games of the campaign, scoring just once.

Club icons Barry Bannan and Liam Palmer continue to pull the strings on the pitch, but in truth there’s scarcely 14 or 15 senior players left at the club after the likes of Josh Windass and Michael Smith chose to walk away in the summer.

Eight of the players that have appeared for the Owls this term are aged 20 or younger and in their first senior season. As the fixture list begins to get more chaotic in traditional Championship style, these youngsters are going to find themselves playing more and more minutes.

With a transfer embargo in place, and Chansiri seemingly unwilling to sell the club he has no interest in owning, it’s hard to paint a positive picture for Sheffield Wednesday. Their players will keep fighting, of that there’s no doubt, but eventually the blows that rain down become too much to battle back from.

Sharpening the Blades

The issues at Sheffield United are rather more self-afflicted.

Losing in the play-off final was deemed not good enough by the club’s board, so Wilder was dispensed off at the end of that 2024/25 campaign.

In came Ruben Selles, a head coach with a curious CV in English football. He won just two of 14 games while in charge of Southampton in 2022/23, guided Reading to 17th place in League One and just about kept Hull City up, albeit on goal difference, last term.

But there was nothing on his ledger that suggested he could take Sheffield United to new heights, aside from a progressive playing style that so many clubs desire these days, and so it was no surprise that the Blades regressed markedly under Selles.

Five consecutive defeats in the Championship, scoring just once, saw United lose 1-4 and 0-5 to Bristol City and Ipswich Town respectively. And so, on September 14, Selles was sacked, one of the earliest dismissals in the history of the second tier. 

In came Wilder, who admitted,as a Sheffield United fan, to having no qualms about returning for a third stint in charge of the club; so distraught was he at what he had seen in the early weeks of the campaign. 

Aside from the Blades’ owners having to stump up compensation payouts to both Wilder and Selles in the space of five months, it was a canny enough move with many of the players that had guided the club to third place in 2024/25 on Wilder’s watch remained.

But getting them to play winning football again… well, that’s the battle. Since Wilder remerged from the tunnel at Bramall Lane, United have lost both of their home games, summoning less than 1.00 xG in both, while a 1-0 win at Oxfor was achieved despite the Blades being played off the park; fortuitous finding the net with one of their two shots on target.

Wilder has had to change his style, with Kieffer Moore, such a pivotal figure as a target man last season, now at Wrexham. Gone is the 4-4-2 shape that took them so close to promotion last term, and in its stead a 4-2-3-1 system that, as yet, hasn’t yielded the uptick in performance level expected.

Will Sheffield United be too good to go down in 2025/26? You would assume so. But there are other clubs that have suffered relegation despite their perceived quality in the past, so Wilder still has an almighty job on his hands in turning the ship around.

Click here for our Discounted Account Offer. Access updated previews and analysis on up to 5 tournaments for 30 days.