Kadeem Harris urges Sheffield Wednesday to show ambition in summer

As Owls manager Garry Monk admitted last week, football clubs are still trying to assess how the coronavirus pandemic affects their finances.

The Championship hope to resume their season behind closed doors to protect the Football League’s £119m-a-year television deal as much as possible.

Although most clubs returned to training yesterday – Hull City, who produced the only two 
positive results in last week’s Covid-19 tests, were already planning to delay until Thursday – a return to contact training, let alone matches, has not yet been voted on.

But with 10 senior players out of contract and five on loan, there will have to be a significant revamp at Hillsborough and winger Harris hopes the Owls do it in a way that signals their intention to return to the Premier League for the first time since 2000.

“The players who have got contracts for the season after this, they’re very good players,” commented Harris, signed from Cardiff City this summer, “so I’m not worried (about 2020-21), it’s just going to be very interesting to see who the club bring in.

“It’ll be great to see them bring in some very good players, to have that ambition to get promotion, because I think the club is way too big of a club – with too much history behind it – to be in the Championship. The fans deserve to be in the Premier League, and I think it’s important that the club show that ambition.”

Of the 10 players out of contract at the end of next month, the Owls are only known to have opened talks with Steven Fletcher and Morgan Fox about extensions before the pandemic.

Their most recent accounts showed a 168 per cent wages-to-turnover ratio which was the Championship’s second-highest.

They avoided breaking “profit and sustainability” rules by selling Hillsborough to owner Dejphon Chansiri and leasing it back, but are under a separate investigation for “how and when” the deal went through. Regardless of the outcome of what the Owls call an “unlawful” charge, it can only be a one-off measure.

That said, clubs across the league will have to tighten their belts. This summer more than ever, “ambition” cannot be confused with reckless spending.

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