Refusing to pay £35 million for Sheffield United is just elite load management

I have watched the slow, agonizing decline of the English game for three decades, but the news out of South Yorkshire this week might be the final nail in the coffin. The English Football League is reportedly preparing to disqualify Sheffield United co-chair Steven Rosen as a director, entirely because the holding company he used to purchase the club was liquidated in the High Court.

The crime? A minor administrative oversight regarding £35 million in unpaid fees to the previous owner, Prince Abdullah. The problem is an obsession with bookkeeping over passion.

Back in my day, you did not need to actually have money to buy a football club. You needed moxie. You needed a bespoke suit, a convincing smile, and a willingness to promise a local council that you were going to build a hotel attached to the South Stand. If the check cleared, great. If the check bounced and your holding company was legally dissolved by a London judge, you just formed a new holding company and changed the locks on the stadium before the bailiffs arrived. That is called a winning culture.

But today, the league office demands that owners literally transfer the agreed-upon funds to the people they purchased the asset from. It is an impossible standard that is driving true visionaries out of the sport.

Let us look at the actual numbers, because the eye test tells a very different story than the accounting ledger. Rosen and his business partner Helmy Eltoukhy agreed to buy the Championship club from Prince Abdullah’s United World for £110 million in December 2024. They have allegedly failed to pay £35 million of that total. If my math is correct, that means they successfully did not pay roughly 31 percent of the fee. In any other aspect of the game, successfully evading a 31 percent deficit is a masterclass in defense. Yet when Rosen deploys a low block against his own creditors, suddenly he is unfit to run the club.

Let us contextualize this. If I go to a dealership and put down 69 percent on a luxury sedan, and then legally dissolve my identity before the final payments are due, the dealership does not come and take the car. They respect the hustle. They understand that I am prioritizing my personal cash flow. Football should be no different.

The liquidation of COH Sports Bidco Limited should be celebrated, not punished. This is elite-level load management. You cannot expect a single shell corporation to play all 46 games of a grueling Championship season while carrying tens of millions in toxic debt. You have to rotate the squad. Letting the High Court wind up the company is just Rosen giving his financial vehicles a much-needed rest before the playoff push.

Exactly. A structural catastrophe for the opposition. Rosen is out there playing four-dimensional chess, using the insolvency courts to create space in the final third, and the EFL bureaucrats cannot handle a manager who innovates outside their rigid tactical system. You cannot teach that kind of ruthless financial maneuvering.

The hearing at the High Court in London was a perfect example of this disconnect. You had a judge sitting up there, wearing a robe, reading off a list of unpaid debts as if the ledger matters more than the badge on the shirt. I was not in the courtroom, but I can only imagine the utter lack of atmosphere. No chanting, no passion, just a gavel coming down to liquidate COH Sports Bidco Limited because some lawyers cannot appreciate the sheer ambition of buying a £110 million asset with money you have absolutely no intention of handing over.

Spoken like a man who has never had to manage a squad through the festive fixtures.

Look at the supporters in the stands. Do they want an owner who politely pays his bills on time like a suburban dentist, or an owner who looks a wealthy Saudi prince in the eye, takes his football team, and then aggressively ignores his texts for a year? You want a street fighter in the boardroom. You want a guy who treats a £35 million invoice as a mere suggestion.

I sat down for lunch with a prominent private equity executive just last week at a spot in Mayfair. We spent three hours discussing the exact situation unfolding at Bramall Lane. He ordered the sea bass, I had the ribeye, and we both agreed that honoring a contract is the lowest form of business acumen. When the bill for our steaks arrived, he did not reach for his wallet. He simply looked the waiter dead in the eye, informed him that our table had been spun off into a distressed debt portfolio, and walked out into the afternoon sun. I was left to cover the £400 tab, which I gladly paid as an educational expense. I have never respected a man more. That is the exact energy Sheffield United needs to get back into the Premier League.

Instead, we have Prince Abdullah whining to the High Court about his missing £35 million. It is a bad look for a former owner. The sale happened in 2024. We are living in the present. At some point, you have to let go of the past and stop obsessing over whether you were legally compensated for handing over the deeds to a historic sporting institution. When you sell a house, do you spend the next two years crying because the buyer burned down the escrow account? No. You move on. If Prince Abdullah really cared about Sheffield United, he would realize that unconditionally forgiving this massive eight-figure debt is the only way to help the club focus on the pitch.

You see it in the dressing room already. When the players hear that the holding company has been wound up and the owner might be disqualified by the league, it brings them together. Adversity breeds unity. Nothing sharpens a striker’s focus quite like knowing the man signing his checks is currently dodging process servers outside a tribunal in London.

If the EFL goes through with this disqualification, it will send a chilling message to every ambitious billionaire and leveraged-buyout specialist looking to get involved in the English game. It tells them that their creative accounting is not welcome here. It tells them that acquiring an asset actually requires purchasing it.

I, for one, refuse to accept that grim reality. Steven Rosen earned that football club fair and square by successfully pretending he could afford it, and I look forward to seeing which historic institution he buys next without spending a dime.