This weekend, Wigan Athletic travel to the Emirates to face the best team in the country away from home in the FA Cup. It recreates memories of old Wigan, successful Wigan, competing with giants as equals.
In April 2012, Roberto Martinez’s team won a Premier League game there as part of their late-season great escape. The following year, a first major trophy but relegation. And then everything fell apart.
There had been too much chaos here for too long. Between 2013 and 2023, Wigan won their only major honour, suffered five relegations, enjoyed three promotions, employed 12 different managers. Hard to even stand still when everything is always moving.
Those managerial decisions were made by five different owners; nothing indicates the chaos and emergency better.
From International Entertainment Corporation (Hong Kong) to Next Leader Fund, another Hong Kong-based consortium that put Wigan Athletic into administration. From the magnificent, club-saving work by Caroline Molyneux and the supporters’ club to Abdulrahman Al-Jasmi and Talal Mubarak al-Hammad, who paid players late and were eventually forced out.
Mike Danson was the saviour, the local businessman made good who agreed to take ownership and try to take Wigan forward. So how is it that it is Danson who is overseeing a club 22nd in League One? That would be Wigan’s lowest finish since 1997 and return fourth-tier football for the first time since the same year.
Once existential threat has subsided, and financial emergency has given way to strategies that aim to reduce repeated annual losses, something else appears that is just as hard to manage: the ordinary. Focus switches to league position, recruitment decisions and failed managers, the stuff that decides seasons rather than saves social institutions.
Last week, Wigan Athletic’s hierarchy publicly backed manager Ryan Lowe. On Saturday, Wigan promptly lost 6-1 at Peterborough United and the club dusted off the corner flag photo and sacked Lowe. You can (generously) credit sporting director Greg Rioch and chief executive Sarah Guilfoyle for their loyalty, but when that turns in an instant it does rather suggest that they have little handle on a perilous situation.
Lowe, their appointment, did not work out at all: 11 months, 49 matches and a win ratio below one every four matches. The feeling is that the squad should at least have been able to finish mid-table, but then Lowe followed Shaun Maloney for their inability to extract better.
I have read reports from supporters who were at London Road on Saturday. One describes it as “worse than admin”; another says it was his “lowest point in 25 years watching Wigan.”
It would be easy to accuse those fans of possessing short memories, or even entitlement given everything that came before. But I think that misses the point. There is a fascinating psychodrama that can envelop post-crisis football clubs and their fanbases.
Financial emergencies are grim to experience, but they are also simplifying. A club becomes stripped down to the basics: survival over progress. Players are judged generously simply because they are there at all.
Managers are judged similarly (take Henrik Pedersen at Sheffield Wednesday and his current win percentage of 2.9) due to the enormity of the task. When that threat recedes, mirrors are uncracked and cleaned and a club is left staring at its own reflection again.
It creates an inescapable dichotomy. In crisis, the mood rarely gets toxic (and if it does, that toxicity is directed towards an errant owner). In “ordinary” times, that toxicity grows more quickly and is shared out amongst many supposedly guilty parties. Pride in the club’s existence is warped into frustration at its direction.
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Stability has returned to Wigan if you view the club through the wider lens. No longer am I coming here to report upon financial devastation or the piecemeal recovery from it. Players are not being sold to keep the lights on. Supporters are confident that they will at least be able to attend matches in 12 months’ time. For a long while even that felt like a privilege.
But surviving chaos does not end the challenges, merely reforms them. Neither does it automatically bestow an ability to function efficiently or logically. Tell supporters that you have overcome one mountain and they will ask – as is their right – where the next peak lies and how the club intends to climb it.
And so Wigan Athletic, after all their previous misdirection, arrive at another crossroads. The concerns over those in positions of influence will only ease if they get their next appointment right and reconnect strands that have become disparate. There are obvious ingredients: better communication, better choices, better results. They fought for years to be normal again. Now they are fighting for disappointment to avoid becoming the norm.
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