Simon Jordan: I was in £50million consortium ready to buy Sheffield Wednesday

Ex-Crystal Palace owner Simon Jordan considered a bid for Sheffield Wednesday as part of a £50million consortium, it has been revealed.

The Owls are currently on the market after being placed into administration, ending the calamitous ownership of Dejphon Chansiri.

Despite their challenging financial situation, Wednesday are thought to have attracted around 80 interested parties.

Most notably, ex-Newcastle owner Mike Ashley submitted a £20m offer, which falls £10m short of the asking price.

Insolvency firm Begbies Traynor are now in the process of selecting the most serious candidates before granting preferred-bidder status to one buyer – which could happen as soon as next week.

American billionaire John McEvoy and Sheffield-born insurance tycoon Ryan Howsam are among those in the running – following a shock enquiry from rival club Sheffield United‘s owners.

But the situation is complicated by the EFL’s ’25p in the Pound’ rule – which means Chansiri must receive 25 per cent of his debt to prevent further sanctions – with Wednesday already docked 12 points.

Interested parties have also been asked to provide proof of £50m in funds to show they can sustain the club.

In a surprising revelation on talkSPORT, Jordan revealed he had managed to muster up the necessary cash to launch a serious bid for Wednesday – a club he has always admired as one of English football’s great sleeping giants.

However, the terms and conditions ultimately led to the 58-year-old withdrawing his interest.

“I put together a consortium of very well-heeled people, who proved up £50m to have a look at Sheffield Wednesday,” Jordan said.

“It’s a club that I’ve always advocated for because I think it’s a big club waiting to happen again if it had proper management and proper ownership and proper direction and proper disciplines around building it back as a football club.

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“But it is massively challenged. The reasons why I’ve decided not to go forward with it is because I don’t like the idea of rewarding Chansiri by having to pay huge parts of the money that he has to get to avoid the EFL regulations of being sanctioned again – because if you don’t pay the ’25p in the Pound’ then ultimately you’ll get another 15-point penalty.

“I would be quite happy to have the ownership of Sheffield Wednesday and have a 15-point penalty in this season because it doesn’t make any difference, you’re going to get relegated and not have it next year.

“I think that’s probably part of Ashley’s thinking – because at £20m you can’t buy Sheffield Wednesday with the debt that’s available to Chansiri to meet the ’25p in the Pound’ rule alongside the purchase of the stadium and what goes with that.”

Jordan as Sheffield Wednesday chairman?

When pressed on whether he would have been chairman of Sheffield Wesnesday if his consortium had completed a deal, Jordan responded: “No. Because I think the person that really fronts a lot of the money should be the person that gets all the attention.

“I would have given them some intellectual capital around how to do it and how not to do it in equal measure.”

Jordan has been out of the football ownership world since his time at Crystal Palace.

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The Englishman, who built his wealth in the mobile phone industry, took over the Eagles in 2000 and guided them to the Premier League in 2004.

However, Jordan left his boyhood club in administration six years later, selling it to a consortium led by current chairman Steve Parish in 2010.

Jordan added: “I always felt when Wednesday first came on the market it was nickable.

“I’m sorry if that sounds like an unpleasant terminology but if you’re going to buy a football club, you want to buy it in the best possible way you can.

“So the investment you put into it is not into the ownership going out the door and rewarding their mistakes, but you want to put it into the football club going forward.

“If you look at Sheffield Wednesday, while it’s a much bigger club in my view than Sheffield United, it’s footprint digitally is smaller than Sheffield United because it hasn’t been in the Premier League for too long.

“So it’s a really long task and it’s a really big task to get them back out of League One to get them back up the pyramid and to get them going again.

“It’ll require a lot of energy, a lot of time, a lot of direction, a lot of money, and for me, I owned a football club once. I’m not racing to go and do that again. It wasn’t the most enjoyable of experiences.”

Who was in the consortium?

Jordan did not name his prospective business partners but said one was a close friend from Sheffield.

The former Palace chairman insisted they were both highly motivated to do the deal before being disenchanted by its structure.

He added: “This model of having to pay 25p per pound to protect the rest of the pyramid is flawed because you’re rewarding and providing a safety net for bad owners.

“If you make a Horlicks of it… and I know the irony is I would love to have been on the other end of 25p per pound because I got nothing when I walked out of Palace. I gave it to Parish and his mob for nothing.

“I should have got £10m/12m quid on that basis, but I took a view that the football club needs to go forward and I took a pill for my own mistakes.

“In this instance, the Football League rewards you. You make a balls-up of it, you ruin a football club and we make sure you get 25p per pound.

“That money should be going to the wellbeing of the football club but it doesn’t.”

What next for Sheffield Wesnesday?

Despite withdrawing his offer, Jordan expects Wednesday to be rescued in the coming weeks.

Although he did have one final warning for the club about the seriousness of their position.

Jordan said: “I do think that Sheffield Wednesday will be fine. They’ll get an ownership model. I don’t know who it will be.

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“Ashley has thrown a fiver on the table and said, ‘Call me if you need me’ – which is the way you buy a football club, quite frankly.

“Whether you like it or not, Sheffield Wednesday is in distress. It has no playing squad. It has no facilities that are up to date. It has no real training ground. It has a stadium that’s falling apart.

“So it’s going to need some real significant investment into it. And I find it difficult to bid to get in a bidding war with people over a distressed asset because to my mind, you’re cutting one another’s throats to get a football club and rewarding Chansiri.”