Brief update on Sheffield Utd and its tortuous ownership paper trail. Last week, the club filed a notce saying its owner had not been a Person with Significant Control (PSC) since Oct 2019. The form, which was filed 5mths months late, got everyone excited about the Newcastle bid.

The speculation was that, effectively, the owner had filed a backdated renunciation of owning the club to eliminate conflict of interest concerns over the bid for Newcastle by Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund.

Adding to the confusion was that Sheffield United had, in February 2020 (three months late), filed another backdated form showing the owner had become a PSC on exactly the same date in Oct 2019 when they were now claiming he'd ceased to be a PSC. Clearly these can't both be true.

The club addressed questions about this with a bizarre, barely comprehensible statement which seemed to simultaneously claim that all filings were accurate, but also that they would also be updated shortly.

So, did they? Yes, to be fair they have.

But first, some brief but important background...

The key thing to understand, which didn't seem well covered last week, is that all of this activity took place in 'THE SHEFFIELD UNITED FOOTBALL CLUB LIMITED' which is the company that the former owner used to own the club. That company no longer owns Sheffield United.

Sheffield United is owned by Blades Leisure Limited, which is the new owner's vehicle.

And so, while it's true that the current owner, or someone working for him, recently filed a pair of mutually exclusive, very late PSC notifications, neither of these has any impact on who owns the club. Cock up rather than conspiracy appears to be the story there.

So, what about the update? Well, late last week Blades Leisure Ltd filed two new documents at Companies House (both months late) showing that the company that now owns the club, which the former owner also founded, passed from control of the old club company to the new in Oct '19

Of course, things aren't quite as simple as all that, because if he won control in September, what was he doing resigning from the company (Blades Leisure) in October 2019?

It seems to me that a possibly explanation for all this was some kind of dispute between the old owner (McCabe) and the new (Prince Abdullah) about which company would own the club - especially as McCabe was continuing to appeal the court decision (until late Jan 2020).

In other words, whatever else may or may not be the case with the Newcastle bid, all these filings at Companies House appear to me mostly likely the administrative unwinding of the ownership dispute.

Which is not to say the conflict of interest concern isn't real between Prince Abdullah and Mohammed bin Salman, just that it doesn't seem, at least to me, the best explanation of what went on at Companies House recently.