shysters
I think you may find it's an interesting example of intentional bad management, ifnancial planning and design. This is the story as I've heard from locals, council members etc...
The city council have historically been so staunchly socialist that they spent the 60s, 70s and 80s actively discouraging business from settling in Sheffield, banking instead on manufacturing as the way to help the proletariat. Then with the collapse of steel and coal in the 80s, they were obviously a little stymied. So that's why there was historically no demand for an airport.
Add to that the bizarre beginnings of the airport - the company meant to develop it had a deal that it could exploit the coal-mines underneath, and when it was finished, would put an airport on the surface. Then the day the coal ran out they conveniently went belly-up.
The new company set up did put a runway down - that was 1 metre too short for consideration for larger category planes, and a couple of hundred short of small jet requirements even though there's plenty of space. Then they took advantage of the tax rules around airport business parks to make a killing, then at some point Peel came in, and have not exactly pushed the issue because they're developing Finningley a few miles up the road, which they somewhat optimistically think will be an intercontinental gateway, and hardly want to foster the local competition.
All of which screws the residents of Sheffield, and those businesses that are there or would like to be, and struggle because of the lack of good connections - the rail link to London takes 2 1/2 hours to go 180 miles, whilst London to York on GNER, 250 miles, is 2 hours.
Branson offered to take over the Midland rail line and spend 1.85 billion to upgrade it so Sheffield would be 1 hour away from London, with spur lines to Manchester and Birmingham, then linking to both east and west coast lines at Leeds - this would have saved the huge cost of upgrading a lot of track elsewhere and might have allowed a reduction in domestic flights as has happened in France and Germany. Naturally, the government said no.