Sheffield United received a demand for money from former owner Prince Abdullah in November, which might have forced the club into administration.

Sheffield United’s 2025-26 season has been, to say the least, mixed. Following significant changes over the summer, in which manager Chris Wilder was fired and replaced by Ruben Selles, an abysmal start to the new season culminated in Selles being fired himself in mid-September and Wilder being restored.

This resulted in an improvement in form, which has at least kept the Blades out of danger of relegation to League One, and with just under a third of the season remaining, even though they are below the halfway point in the Championship table, there is still a chance that they will claim a play-off spot at the end of the season.

However, there is still some dissatisfaction among Bramall Lane fans with the way Sheffield United has been run since COH Sports took over the club, and this perception was exacerbated by reports at the end of 2025 that the club could be plunged into crisis as a result of a legal letter sent to the club in November.

Sheffield United were issued a statutory demand in November 2025.

In December, Sky Sports reported that Sheffield United had received a statutory demand from former owner Prince Abdullah for an unpaid £10 million installment towards the cost of COH Sports’ initial purchase of the club.Prince Abdullah’s lawyers submitted a statutory demand last month, giving COH Sports, a US-based partnership, 21 days to settle the bill. When that deadline passed, they handed them a further three weeks to pay the debt or risk a winding-up order, which could have sent the club into administration.”

The article also confirmed that Prince Abdullah had written to the EFL with concerns about how COH Sports would fund the club’s future operations, and that COH Sports had been speaking with him and others about the possibility of investment in exchange for a minority stake in the club, though these talks were confirmed to have failed.

Statutory demand issuance will not have quelled the worries of those concerned about COH Sports’ ownership of Sheffield United.

A statutory demand is a pre-action protocol letter that requires full payment of a debt before a winding-up petition is filed with a court. They are generally regarded as a serious concern, and are frequently employed as a collection technique in the event of continuous late or nonpayment of an existing debt.

They give the debt 21 days to be paid, and if it is not dealt with – either by paying the debt, making an arrangement to pay it to the creditor’s satisfaction, or applying to the court to set aside the demand, which can only normally be done if it was sent incorrectly – the creditor must file a winding-up petition.

These letters have no direct relationship with administration, but enterprises that are unable to meet statutory demands may request to enter administration at this stage because doing so immediately eliminates the prospect of liquidation and protects them from further legal action. Given that he acquired ownership of the club by defeating former Blades chairman Kevin McCabe in a High Court struggle, Prince Abdullah appears to be well-versed in English legal procedures.

Since then, both Prince Abdullah and Sheffield United have maintained complete radio silence on the topic, indicating that the demand has been met. Sky Sports said that “after this latest legal dispute, they [COH Sports] are currently up-to-date with all monies owed to the previous owner,” however this is a little hazy statement in an area of law that may be quite exact in its definitions.

However, Sheffield United fans who are concerned about COH Sport’s ownership of the club will not be comforted by the fact that a formal demand was issued at all. The American venture capital group completed their purchase of the club in December 2024, but there have been few signs that it was a successful purchase, with the team missing out on a quick return to the Premier League at the end of 2024-25 and remaining in the bottom half of the Championship table for the entire season.

The statutory demand lodged against the club may have been satisfied, but a large portion of the Blades’ fan base remains dissatisfied with the way the team has been governed since the takeover.