Sheffield United’s £11m Loan Adds New Twist to Ownership Dispute

Sheffield United have spent much of the summer trying to keep a fairly important line between the football club and the increasingly messy dispute above it. Their own accounts contain an £11 million reason why that line might not be quite so clean.

COH Sports Bidco Limited, the company used by Steven Rosen and Helmy Eltoukhy’s consortium to buy Sheffield United in December 2024, lent the club £11m during the 2024/25 financial year. The loan was unsecured, interest-free and repayable on demand.

On 19 August, COH Sports Bidco was wound up by the High Court following its dispute with former owner United World over money still owed from the takeover. United World said around £35m remained unpaid. Sheffield United stressed that the proceedings concerned Bidco rather than Sheffield United Football Club Limited and said the club’s operations were unaffected.

That remains correct. Sheffield United have not entered liquidation. But the accounts show Bidco wasn’t simply the company that bought the club. It was also a company the club owed money to.

At 30 June 2025, Sheffield United recorded the full £11m among amounts falling due within one year. The accounts identify COH Sports Bidco as the lender and describe the money as unsecured, interest-free and repayable on demand. What looked like a fairly ordinary owner loan when lender and borrower sat within the same group becomes a different question once the lender is being wound up.

Official Insolvency Service guidance says money owed to a company in liquidation is among the assets an Official Receiver or liquidator has to deal with and potentially recover. If Bidco still owned the £11m receivable when it was wound up, the dispute surrounding Sheffield United’s takeover could therefore have a financial connection to the club itself.

There is a fairly substantial if in that sentence.

The accounts establish what Sheffield United owed on 30 June 2025, not what they owe today. The loan may since have been repaid, transferred, converted into equity, subordinated or otherwise dealt with as the ownership structure changed. There is currently no public evidence establishing which, if any, of those happened, so it would be wrong to say Sheffield United now owe the Official Receiver £11m.

It does leave a question worth answering: where did the loan go?

The timing makes that particularly relevant. Sheffield United’s ownership was subsequently moved beneath 1919 Partners LLC, another Delaware company. United World alleged that the restructuring moved the club away from the company which owed the outstanding takeover consideration. The owners rejected that interpretation, describing the change as a more efficient structure for future investment, while the EFL has examined the ownership changes.

An £11m repayment would also be meaningful in the context of Sheffield United’s finances, although the accounts don’t suggest a club sitting on the edge of insolvency. Relegation from the Premier League cut turnover from £137.6m to £79.3m in 2024/25, with broadcast income falling by £56.4m. United recorded a £16.6m operating loss before £25.4m of profit from player sales helped produce a £2.6m pre-tax profit.

At year-end, the club had £2.8m in cash, £4m of net assets and £51.4m more current liabilities than current assets. That last figure isn’t simply £51.4m of bank debt waiting to be paid, but it does show why another eight-figure liability would deserve attention. The directors expected the shortfall to be managed through player sales and continued ownership support, while Grant Thornton did not identify a material uncertainty over the club continuing as a going concern when the accounts were signed.

Sheffield United already have a complicated financing structure, with Companies House recording outstanding security involving Macquarie, Santander, MSD Investment Corp and United World. Any remaining Bidco loan would have to be understood alongside those arrangements rather than as an isolated £11m bill suddenly landing at Bramall Lane.

For much of the summer, the reassuring line for Sheffield United supporters has been that the fight over the takeover belongs above the football club. There is still no evidence that the club itself is in financial distress because of it, nor that an £11m demand is coming.

But buried in Sheffield United’s own accounts is a reminder that football ownership is rarely as tidy as the boxes on an organisation chart. The company being wound up didn’t just buy the club. It lent it £11m.

Until somebody establishes what happened to that money, it is difficult to draw quite such a clean line between the two.