Do the accounts show that Sheffield Wednesday's league decline is to be expected?

But what about now? Are the club paying over the odds to see themselves battling relegation?

We can’t know for sure until up-to-date accounts are released, but let’s take a look from the information we have.

So they didn’t overspend?

According to figures taken from football finance expert Keiran Maguire, Wednesday were the 12th highest-spending Championship club in terms of wage expenditure in 2018/19, a position that mirrors their exact place in the division’s final standings.

The 2018/19 findings show that wage expenditure seems to be a remarkably good indicator of where a team should be expected to finish. The three lowest-spending teams; Rotherham (£7.8m), Bolton (£14.1m) and Ipswich (£19m) took all three relegation places.

But there are huge anomalies in that Reading (£40.7m) were the eighth-highest spending team and finished in a lowly 20th place, while the data represents a truly remarkable effort by Wednesday cross-city rivals Sheffield United (£19m), who were the fourth-lowest spenders but finished in second place.

The Blades were the only top six club not among the top seven highest spenders, effectively taking the place of Stoke (£56m), who finished 16th.

With spending the metric, Wednesday finished in the exact position they should have done.

What about now?

Though it will only become public knowledge when the accounts for the following two seasons are released, it is expected that the club will reveal further cuts in wage expenditure year-on-year.

Though it is difficult to speculate on figures paid out to individuals, the 2018/19 accounts come before the release of a raft of big-name first team players.

The following summer saw the release or sale of George Boyd, Gary Hooper, Marco Matais, Almen Abdi, David Jones, Daniel Pudil and Lucas Joao as well as the ridding of any contribution to wages for Premier League players Josh Onomah, Michael Hector, Rolando Aarons and Achraf Lazaar.

Last summer saw the departures of Fernando Forestieri, Steven Fletcher, Morgan Fox, Atdhe Nuhiu and Sam Winnall. Loanees Jacob Murphy, David Bates, Connor Wickham and Alessio Da Cruz also left the club.

While these players have been replaced; the likes of Josh Windass, Massimo Luongo, Kadeem Harris and Callum Paterson are likely to be on reasonable wages, the squad turnover surely represents a shift in spending policy.

And by this logic lower spending means, most likely, lower league position.

What does the expert say?

Maguire told The Star: “Wednesday weren’t overspending on wages in 2018/19, they were bang in the middle. There were clubs such as Rotherham, Bolton, Millwall who were very cautious in terms of wages, but those clubs weren’t trying to compete for promotion as Wednesday were.

“The club has clearly retrenched from where it was in the first three years of Dejphon Chansiri’s regime. It spent £36m over those three years on new players and didn’t have significant sales. Then we get to 2019 and they spent only £1.1m.

“I think going forward realistically the club is not going to be spending the amount of money we saw in the early days of Mr Chansiri’s regime at the club.”

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