The Steel City Derby returns after 5 years away, and it’s worth your time
Sheffield Wednesday and Sheffield United renew one of England’s best and most underrated rivalries.
Almost every Sunday during the club season, you can find a Premier League game on TV at 8:30 a.m. ET, 1:30 p.m. local time in England. That’s not the case this Sunday because the stage has been cleared for a second division game. That timeslot will be filled by Championship local rivals Sheffield Wednesday and Sheffield United, which fans in America can catch on ESPN3.
It’s been five years since the two Sheffield sides have played each other. Wednesday achieved promotion from League One in the 2011-12 season, while the Blades had to wait until last season to finally make their way back to the second tier. This season, both teams look capable of making the playoffs, but neither can be considered the big favorite for promotion. United currently sits in sixth place, while the Owls are ninth.
Hillsborough seats 39,732 and a couple of thousand of those seats will be empty for security purposes — this fixture has a history of crowd trouble — but the crowd atmosphere is likely to be better than you’re used to hearing from Premier League derbies with twice as many attendees.
In addition to the ferocity, this is the most closely contested derby in English football. In over 127 league games, United has 48 wins, Wednesday has 48 wins, and there have been 40 draws. In FA Cup play, each team has three wins apiece to go along with three draws. The Steel City Derby will be worth your time on Sunday morning.
Meet Sheffield
Sheffield is known as the Steel City, and SB Nation’s Bill Connelly noted that it’s a lot like America’s own steel city, Pittsburgh. People in both cities are fiercely loyal to their local teams in the face of all logic. Most of the steel jobs are gone in both cities, but both have reinvented themselves as college towns that are great places to get a beer or six. Both have old houses built into hillsides. And both have an affiliation with greasy fried potato sandwiches.
Soccer as we know it was invented in London and codified in Cambridge, but Sheffield claims to be the home of the game’s soul and greatest innovations. The oldest continuously operating football club in the world is Sheffield FC, currently playing in England’s eighth tier.
Sheffield birthed the Arctic Monkeys, whose music and initial local popularity tells you quite a bit about Wednesday and United fans as well. On the band’s debut album, Alex Turner sang a lot about disdain for the fake people you meet at clubs and the ways commercialism makes people feel like garbage. Unsurprisingly, the rabid fans who circulated that band’s demos and went to their local shows are also people who are very much against modern football.
A brief history
Sheffield Wednesday is the older of the two clubs and was founded in 1867 by local steel workers. The name “Wednesday” comes from the day that the team initially played its matches — it was the day the players and fans had off work. In 1889, Wednesday left Bramall Lane over a financial dispute, but the owners still wanted a football club to play there, so Sheffield United was formed. To this day, United plays its home games at what was originally Wednesday’s home ground.
Both clubs have spent most of their histories around the top two divisions of English football, though without much in the way of trophies. United last won the top flight title in the 1897–98 season and has won the FA Cup four times, but not since 1925. Wednesday’s trophy record is similar — four league titles, most recently in the 1929–30 season and three FA Cups, most recently in 1935.
Wednesday was most recently in the Premier League in 2000 and has suffered numerous financial crises since its relegation, though the club has been stable since clearing a massive tax debt in 2010. United was relegated from the Premier League in controversial fashion in 2006-07 — the club finished three points behind West Ham United, which was fined but not otherwise punished for breaking Premier League rules in the signings of Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano. United went down on the final day of the season, losing at home to Wigan Athletic.
After years of failing to live up to its favorites tag in League One, United finally won the league last season, securing promotion to the Championship. Wednesday has made the promotion playoffs for three seasons in a row but has failed to make it to the Premier League all three times.
This year’s teams
Feeling the need to beef up its squad in a higher division, Sheffield United brought in 10 new players this summer — eight on permanent deals and two on loan. American fans might get a glimpse of USMNT Under-20 star Cameron Carter-Vickers, who is on loan with the Blades from Tottenham Hotspur. Wednesday had a much more conservative summer off the back of their playoff finishes.
United plays with a back three and will feel good about their chances of neutralizing Wednesday’s classic English 4-4-2 with a pair of big strikers up top: Gary Hooper and Steven Fletcher. They can also change things up with tricky playmaker Fernando Forestieri and goal-poacher Jordan Rhodes. United’s danger man up top is local favorite and captain Billy Sharp — he joined the Blades as a teenager, bounced around a dozen clubs, then eventually landed with United again as the club’s star striker in his late 20s.
Fans singing? Yeah, let’s do some fans singing.
United has a song about the aforementioned greasy fried potato sandwiches:
But Hi Ho Sheffield Wednesday is also up there in the upper pantheon of fan songs:
You will not regret flipping on ESPN3 this Sunday morning.