Exclusive look: Fernando Forestieri opens up on his Sheffield Wednesday refusal in 2016

Fernando Forestieri angered Sheffield Wednesday fans in 2016 when he refused to play against Norwich City.

Fernando Forestieri back at Hillsborough last year. Image: SWFC YouTube

The Argentine was arguably the best player that Wednesdayites had seen in years after he joined the club from Watford in the early days of Dejphon Chansiri, and he came so close to helping the Owls back to the promised land of the Premier League in 2015/16.

Promotion eluded them, unfortunately, and as the following campaign got underway multi-million-pound bids were coming in for the attacker that Chansiri quickly batted away. It didn’t go down well.

Now, for the first time, Forestieri has opened up on the situation in Dom Howson’s ‘Carlos Had A Dream’ book.

There’s an exclusive look below, and you could win a copy for yourself at the bottom of the page…

Forestieri refused to travel to Wednesday’s game at Norwich City amid speculation linking him with a move to Derby County and Newcastle United. A £7m bid from Derby had already been rejected. The noise had unsettled Forestieri and Carvalhal later admitted the player’s ‘mind was not in the right place’ to be involved at Carrow Road as Wednesday ground out a goalless draw.

He had already needed convincing by Carvalhal and Glenn Loovens to play in the season opener against Aston Villa a week earlier – a match in which he scored the winner. Chansiri, meanwhile, made his stance unequivocal: none of Wednesday’s key players were for sale.

Forestieri eventually issued a contrite apology to his teammates, Carvalhal, Chansiri and the supporters, describing his actions as ‘unacceptable and unprofessional’. But years later, he offered a fuller, more reflective explanation.

“I want to say sorry again to the fans because it was a very bad reaction from me,” he said. “But I also felt I was right. Every human being understands this: if you have a shop, and the shop next door offers you something better – and that next door was the Premier League – of course you think about leaving. Everyone would. And if the club had sold me and other players, then we wouldn’t talk about transfer embargoes or anything like that later down the line. It would have been a different situation. Some fans were angry with me, but they didn’t know what was really happening with Chansiri.

Carlos Had a Dream - Inside Carlos Carvalhal’s SWFC Revolution - Dom Howson

“My agent wanted to speak to him to explain the situation, but Chansiri didn’t want to speak to my agent. I went to the stadium to try and speak to Chansiri and he said: ‘Fer, I don’t want to talk.’ I was angry because we had just gone so close to going up and he didn’t want to speak to me about my future. I wanted to say: ‘I made a mistake but please, you need to sell players, you need to do something.’

“But he didn’t want to hear me. So my reaction was: ‘Okay, if you don’t want to hear me, then for the next game I won’t play.’ Maybe it could have been different. I was transparent in that moment. I could have faked an injury, said something was wrong and avoided everything. Other players might have done that. But I went straight and said: ‘I’m not playing because of this reason.’ I’m a transparent person. I always said I would die on the pitch for the fans. At that time, I was frustrated and it felt like the right thing. Because if he had sold me then, we wouldn’t be talking about this now.”

For your chance to win your own copy of ‘Carlos Had A Dream’, leave a comment on this article with the estimated release date of the book. (Hint: The answer is in the link above).