Doing the 92 is Daniel Storey’s odyssey to every English football league club in a single season. This is club 81/92. The best way to follow his journey and read all of the previous pieces is by subscribing here
Every time you go to Wigan Athletic, it is worth admiring the statue of Dave Whelan for a few moments. It is rare for two reasons: the joyful look on his face (statues very rarely veer from the serious or studious expression) and the rapid rate in which it was conceived and forged. Three and a half years after Whelan lifted the FA Cup at Wembley, Wigan’s finest hour, the image was cast in bronze and unveiled on the owner’s 80th birthday.
Then Whelan was the poster boy of this town, the local man turned multimillionaire who was raised in Wigan, sculpted by football and then bought his local club and took it to places nobody ever thought possible. Everything that has happened since has hurt Wigan. It must have hurt Whelan most.
Now Wigan have poster boys galore. It is early April and new manager Ryan Lowe is watching over his players during their warm-up before a local derby against Bolton Wanderers. In the matchday squad are eight different academy graduates, but that is nothing new.
No club in England has used more academy players this season than the Latics. They account for more than 35 per cent of all their league minutes. These are all the leaders of Wigan now.
There can be few clubs in England who have had a busier decade. Between 2013 and 2023, Wigan won their only major honour, suffered five relegations and enjoyed three promotions. They employed 12 different managers. Those decisions were made by five different owners. It is that last sentence that is most remarkable.
A potted history of the chaos and misery: In 2015, Whelan stood down as chairman and handed over day-to-day control to his grandson, 23-year-old David Sharpe. After bouncing around between the Championship and League One (23rd, 1st, 23rd, 1st) and with the absence of Premier League broadcasting revenue continuing to bite hard, a sale was agreed to a Hong Kong-based company called International Entertainment Corporation in November 2018.
By June 2020, owner Stanley Choi had become unhappy at Wigan losing money (hardly a secret before his purchase) and Covid-19 caused unforeseen financial impacts to his business. He sold to Next Leader Fund (NLF), a Hong Kong-based organisation. Four weeks later, Au Yeung Wai Kay who reportedly owned the majority of NLF and had repaid all of IEC’s investment in full, put Wigan into administration. Enter emergency mode No 1.
Wigan Athletic 0-1 Bolton Wanderers (Tuesday 1 April)
- Game no: 81/92
- Miles: 201
- Cumulative miles: 15,468
- Total goals seen: 211
- The one thing I’ll remember in May: The organic pre-match atmosphere of a local derby being killed by the ear-splitting music of MC Finchy. Bloody good DJ.
Wigan was saved because its supporters – including the magnificent fundraiser and chairperson of the supporters’ club Caroline Molyneux – rallied around and worked tirelessly to campaign and generate donations that enabled Wigan to prove that they could be registered in the EFL and avoid likely extinction. The speed and the volume of the money raised was genuinely astonishing. It, and only it, ensures that this story continues.
The club was eventually sold in March 2021 to Bahraini businessmen Abdulrahman Al-Jasmi and Talal Mubarak al-Hammad, relief that caused a jolt in good form on the pitch and allowed Wigan to avoid relegation to League Two. A year later, Wigan won the League One title and supporters were persuaded into believing that the worst days were over.
They were not. In March 2023, two years after the Bahraini takeover, Wigan announced heavy annual losses and were docked points for failing to pay players. Over the subsequent several months, it became clear that wages had consistently been paid late, that the owners were not prepared to fund the club in the future and that relegation back to League One was the least of supporters’ concerns.
That is the environment that Wigan Warriors owner Mike Danson stepped into in summer 2023, another paramedic for a football club on the edge. Everybody was tired; everybody was in pain. In their last five completed seasons, Wigan have been deducted 23 points. The FA Cup win in 2013 was worth it because it was the best day of their lives. But if all this is some vague karmic rebalance, it feels desperately cruel.
There are scars at Wigan; it would be more surprising if there weren’t. You can just about take losing matches and losing seasons in your stride. But seeing your club punished for the carelessness and hopelessness of those who had a responsibility to cherish it breaks the spirit. You become guarded as a means of emotional self-preservation.
Danson is dealing with more tangible wounds. Wigan Athletic’s annual accounts were released recently and revealed an annual pre-tax loss of £8.2m. If that sounds bleak in League One’s lower reaches, it is down from £13.4m the previous year. It is often underappreciated just how far, and for how long, the ripples of ownership calamity spread. Two years down the line, Wigan are still bleeding.
An answer – and it is probably the only available answer – is to rebuild Wigan using player trading, youth development and their academy. Last summer, Charlie Hughes was sold to Hull City and, in January, Thelo Asgaard was sold to Luton Town. Both were academy graduates and the fees were the two highest raised by player sales by Wigan since 2017. This is the future.
The fascinating aspect is how this strategy can change the course of entire careers. A club enters a financial emergency, is forced to turn to young, homegrown players and those players make the most of the opportunity to accelerate their own development. At my own club Nottingham Forest, that period was 2001-2003: Michael Dawson, Andy Reid, Marlon Harewood and Jermaine Jenas all came through.
Look at Southampton 2009: Adam Lallana, Jack Cork, Morgan Schneiderlin. Look at Crystal Palace 2010: Victor Moses, Nathaniel Clyne, Wilfried Zaha. Look at Ipswich Town 2003: Darren Bent and Darren Ambrose. One potential offset of administration is teenagers getting first-team minutes. If successful, they can bring supporters closer to the club (and in a positive way rather than “my club needs me”) and then be sold to safeguard the future.
Long-term thinking at a club that has experienced short-term emergency can also be hard for supporters to process. You have got used to coping from day to day and week to week, desperate for information to either ease or reinforce your fears. Then you are expected to shift to a season-to-season mindset. Once you only craved escape from the deafening sound of crisis. Then the silence itself unnerves you.
That is not helped by football’s general tendency towards impatience. Wigan Athletic need to just be for a bit, but being is easily mistranslated into stagnating. There is a lingering gratitude amongst most Wigan supporters that they have a football club at all, but it quickly dissipates over fallow months.
So shout it from the rooftops: here, long-termism is a privilege. Finally, Wigan get to think about the future rather than the present. Progress is never linear, nothing is guaranteed and nothing will come easy, but that only makes the process itself worth getting behind. Stuff the probable destinations for now; try to enjoy the journey for a change.
That journey is the creation of a new Wigan. In the 2013 FA Cup final, a matchday squad of 12 different nationalities was managed by a Spaniard. This season, Wigan have used one player born outside of the UK and Ireland and he moved to England at the age of 13. Nobody has had more academy players involved. Few have a younger, more local team.
For now, that is enough. On one level, those academy players are evidence of what went wrong here and how close it all came to ending forever. I prefer a different spin: those academy players indicate rebirth, a chance for Wigan to live a second life free from panic and fear.
Daniel Storey has set himself the goal of visiting all 92 grounds across the Premier League and EFL this season. You can follow his progress via our interactive map and find every article (so far) here
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