Ask any Sheffield Wednesday fan and they’ll tell you their club is massive. But, bias aside, they do have a point. With plenty of top flight pedigree in their history books, a near 40,000 seater stadium, and around 6,000 more than that following the team to Wembley for the League One play-off final this season, it’s safe to say Sheffield Wednesday are a sleeping giant.

They have been asleep for a long time, though. The Owls were one of the founding members of the Premier League in 1992 and had spent the majority of their history in the top flight, but have not played in the Premier League since their relegation at the turn of the millennium. Since then, the club has been up and down between the Championship and League One, but a decade-long stint in the second tier of English football ended in 2021. Then, a fourth placed finish in League One in the 2021/22 campaign led to defeat in the play-off semi-final to eventual winners Sunderland, and Darren Moore was tasked with doing it all over again this term.

Picking yourself back up after disappointment is something Wednesday fans are all too familiar with by now. Lee, a supporter of the team for almost 50 years, has seen it all; the good, the bad, and the ugly. “That relegation in 2000 was far more painful than the recent drop. All my life I had seen Wednesday competing with the very best in the country, so to see us losing our top flight status really stung. What we have witnessed over the last 20 years or so is the aftermath of that initial relegation. The club has lost its way somewhat, both financially and in terms of its ethos. All we want as fans is a bit of stability, and if we get that, there’s a good chance we can climb our way back to the Premier League eventually.”

They are a glass-half-full kind of army, these Owls’ fans. A couple of relegations and missed opportunities in the play-offs aren’t enough to wipe the smile off the faces of the 20,000 plus supporters making their way into Hillsborough Stadium each week, and with each new season comes a fresh wave of optimism. On the build-up to the 2022/23 campaign, Lee said: “We were so close in the previous season, and we knew we had a chance this year. A club like ours should always be competing for promotion in League One, and I remember having a really good feeling about what was to come. In a way, you forget that disappointment [of the defeat to Sunderland] almost instantly and buy into the dream once more.”