Zero Points Never Felt So Good
72 Days · Day 46 · League One
How do you celebrate finishing bottom of the Championship with nothing? If you’re Sheffield Wednesday, loudly.
2 May 2026, and Hillsborough is full for a dead rubber. Sheffield Wednesday have been relegated since February. They begin the afternoon on minus three points, the arithmetic of an 18-point deduction that no amount of effort could outrun. But hours earlier the club announced it had been sold: administration over, the Chansiri era finished, and the new owner out on the pitch before kick-off to address the sold-out crowd. Then Nathaniel Chalobah scored. Then Liam Palmer, academy graduate and lifelong Owl, scored. Wednesday beat West Brom 2–1 for their first home league win of the entire season, at the last possible opportunity, and their points total climbed from minus three to exactly zero. The ground celebrated like it was a cup final.
To understand why one of England’s grandest old clubs threw a party for nothing, you have to understand where they’d been.
At a glance
Founded: 1867, as The Wednesday, an offshoot of a cricket club named for its members’ day off
Ground: Hillsborough (just under 40,000 at full strength; the North Stand is under repair this summer)
Nickname: The Owls
Manager: Henrik Pedersen
25/26 finish: 24th in the Championship on zero points after an 18-point deduction, relegated in February
26/27 league: League One
The oldest joke name in football, and the trophies to go with it
Sheffield Wednesday sounds like an invented name, and in a way it is: invented by Victorian craftsmen whose cricket club met on their Wednesday half-day off, and who added a football section in 1867 to keep the group together through winter. The club was simply The Wednesday until 1929. The nickname came later, when they settled in the Owlerton district of north-west Sheffield in 1899, at the ground that would become Hillsborough. Owlerton, Owls. Football’s great names are rarely this accidental.
And this was, for a long stretch, one of the most important clubs in England. Four league titles (1902–03, 1903–04, 1928–29, 1929–30), three FA Cups (1896, 1907, 1935). Their last major trophy is the one every neutral should watch: the 1991 League Cup final, when second-tier Wednesday beat Alex Ferguson’s Manchester United 1–0 through John Sheridan’s strike. No club from outside the top flight has won a major English trophy since. In perfect Wednesday fashion, Yorkshire Television cut away from the celebrations to a scheduled programme called War of the Monster Trucks, a snub so beloved by fans that a fanzine took the name. Glory, insufficiently televised, followed by absurdity: the club in miniature.
The early 1990s team of Chris Waddle, David Hirst and Sheridan reached both domestic cup finals in 1992–93 and lost both to Arsenal. Relegation from the Premier League came in 2000, and Wednesday have not been back. What they have produced instead is the greatest play-off tie ever played: 4–0 down to Peterborough after the 2023 League One semi-final first leg, they won the second leg 5–1 after extra time and went through on penalties, Hillsborough shaking itself half to pieces. At Wembley, Josh Windass headed the winner in the 123rd minute. That is the club’s soul: capable of the impossible, allergic to the straightforward.
One part of the story is not theirs to mythologise. On 15 April 1989, 97 Liverpool supporters died as a result of the crush at the FA Cup semi-final held at Hillsborough. The disaster belongs to Liverpool’s history and to British public life, and the memorial outside the ground is a permanent obligation, not a footnote. Any visit starts there.
Where they are now: reborn, literally
The collapse was long in the making. Under owner Dejphon Chansiri, wages went unpaid, embargoes stacked up, and in October 2025 the club entered administration, taking an automatic 12-point deduction. A further six points followed in December for repeated payment failures, and Chansiri was banned from EFL club ownership for three years. Relegation was confirmed on 22 February, cruelly, at Bramall Lane by Sheffield United, the earliest relegation in EFL history. Wednesday won two league games all season.
Then came 2 May. Arise Capital Partners, an American consortium led by aviation executive David Storch, completed its takeover, and the EFL waived the additional 15-point penalty that would ordinarily follow insolvency. The club’s own announcement was titled, without much exaggeration, Sheffield Wednesday Reborn. Wednesday start League One on zero points, which after this season counts as a luxury.
Henrik Pedersen, the Dane who steered a skeleton squad through the whole nightmare, stays in charge and has been rebuilding all summer. And the emotional keystone is back: Barry Bannan, the captain who reluctantly left for Millwall in January while the club sat in administration, re-signed on 9 July. “I didn’t have to think twice about it,” he said. The fans have answered in kind: a club-record 22,786 season tickets sold for a third-tier campaign. The season opens away at Leyton Orient on 15 August.
The fans, the ground, the rivals
Sheffield is a two-club city split roughly down the middle, and the Steel City derby against Sheffield United is one of English football’s oldest rivalries, first contested in 1890. Its finest hour for the blue half was the 1993 FA Cup semi-final, moved to Wembley after fan pressure, which Wednesday won 2–1. Its cruellest came this February, when United relegated them. Derby results here decide who can enter the family group chat safely.
What marks this fanbase out is what it did while the club was dying. Supporters marched, boycotted merchandise, and sang the anthem of the resistance: “I don’t care about Dejphon, he don’t care about me, all I care about is Sheffield Wednesday”. The Sheffield Wednesday Supporters’ Trust organised the opposition and, when administration finally came, called it “one of the most bittersweet days in our club’s proud 158-year history”: a financial catastrophe, and also the day they got their club back. On r/SheffieldWednesday, the mood this summer has flipped from gallows humour to something Wednesdayites barely recognise, which is optimism. The shorthand you’ll see everywhere is WAWAW: We’re All Wednesday, Aren’t We.
Hillsborough itself, all corroded grandeur, is getting the investment it has needed for years, with major North Stand works underway this summer. On a full night under the lights, with the Kop in voice, there is still nowhere in the third tier like it.
Where to find them
Official site: swfc.co.uk
X / Twitter: @swfc
Instagram: @swfcofficial
Facebook: Sheffield Wednesday FC
YouTube: @officialswfc
Subreddit: r/SheffieldWednesday
Forum: Owlstalk
Fan podcast: The Wednesday ‘Til I Die Podcast
Supporters’ trust: SWFC Supporters Trust
72 Days is a daily countdown to the EFL 2026/27 season, one club per day, all 72, League Two and up. Tomorrow: Leicester City, and the strange sight of a former Premier League champion in the third tier. If you want it in your inbox, subscribe.