Get Living or Get Dying

I hope you have a good summer thus far. I have tried to enjoy my summer and step away from the malaise but no more. As ever, I don’t know the facts, I don’t even know the answer. All I have is my thoughts, so let’s crack on…...

GET LIVING

This is us now. Apart from moving from Springfield Park to a cavernous soul-less bowl, we are probably right back where we were before the Whelan era. Forced to play second fiddle to a sport 99% of the country and probably 99.9% of the world doesn’t give a toss about. But we’ve got a club right? We have to accept that the 11^th hour of rescue from extinction came with terms and conditions.

It’s the summer of 2023. Wigan Athletic’s players are about to walk, The Bahraini “Owners” have walked, they have no intention of putting any more money in and ultimately would have just chucked the keys to the supporters club and told them to crack on. Suddenly left with a situation where a load of well meaning volunteers would have to find a couple of million pounds – not once – but every single month to keep the club going.

There was an alternative, certainly from the first admin, the local solution. I’m using round numbers here, but essentially a group of local businessmen, sorry businesspeople but they were all men I think. Let’s assume 10 of them, nowhere near rich enough to fund the tens of millions needed to run a football club but perhaps willing to chuck in a million quid each to keep the lights on. £10m quid doesn’t go a long way in football though, does it? And the future would have been equally bleak under that scenario as it is now. Players sold, shoestring budgets, probably relegation to a point where the losses are minimal because agents don’t pull the wages up.

And the worst bit of all? Ten decent Laticsmen (and women?), lifelong fans who happen to have made a bit of money, would be getting the same dog’s abuse that Danson is getting now from some of our more angry fans.

Maybe they wouldn’t. Maybe they would have communicated throughout the situation. And maybe every one of our fans would have wholly accepted the austerity on offer. I mean, one of the biggest criticisms over the Danson family, isn’t what they are or aren’t doing, it is the complete absence of communication, the complete absence of a plan.

It’s worth saying that most of those businessfolk are still around as key sponsors. Read between the lines, but if they weren’t happy with the ownership, would that be the case? We know one or two walked when The Bahraini experiment was going tits up.

Of course, there was plenty comms from Talal but the situation was no better. So the story went Al Jasmi gave him £10m to buy a football club for his son. He who shall not be named burnt through £20m in 18 months and left running costs of £2m a month, £24m a year. Al Jasmi’s son died, Al Jasmi was/is unwell and Talal was just left carrying the can, genuinely fronting up, but pushing out bullshit and promises he couldn’t deliver cos his uncle had turned the taps off. And we were all blissfully unaware of it, until it was too late. Why on earth did some Arabs want to own Wigan Athletic in the first place and pump all their money into it? We didn’t care whilst they did, until they didn’t. So who’s next in line?

Effectively, we are owned by a billionaire, but he is a reluctant owner. The deal was: OK I’ll bail out your football club because the local MP twisted my arm, meet it’s immediate commitments (again, the subject of much contention but supposedly anything in the region of £15-30m) but after that you are on your own. Hell, he may well have even only been convinced to buy the club on the basis that he would actually recover most of that bailout money, which we have seen happen through the sale of every piece of precocious talent we had ever since.

What option did we have? We didn’t. Every now and then, someone brings up Mike Ashley, but that was never an option, nor was it blocked. Do you not think it would have been progressed if it was? He was linked with Sheffield Wednesday too during their turmoil, do you not think if Mike Ashley wanted a football club, he would have got one by now? There was no truth in this, nor was there any other buyers. I was close enough to happenings in the club to know this, and also close enough to many contacts in the local area involved with the sale and repurchase. If we hadn’t paid and secured Hughes and Aasgaard, then even Mike Danson would have walked and things would have spiralled ever further from there. Not that I have any need to tell anyone this but enough time has passed to hopefully not get me in trouble. Unfortunately, if you’re looking for a current update, I don’t have a clue what is happening at present, and I’m not sure anyone does, even those on the board of the club.

For now, we just need to ride the wave of despondency and suck it up. Withdrawing support will only validate the need to cut costs more, for that is clearly the environment we are in. I take my counsel from lifelong mates and fans who I have a pint with in the Brick and at half time. Their support and mine is 99.9% unconditional. You’re either a lifelong fan or not, and if you’re spouting off about not renewing because the squad isn’t being strengthened, but would come running back if a(nother) billionaire took over and started pumping money in. Well, take a good at yourself will you? That is conditional, fairweather support in a nutshell.

We’ve been spoilt for decades and now we are back being run like the club was before owners started pumping money in, that is just the way it is. Get supporting your team. We owe it to Gary Caldwell and his team. As I always say, there’s plenty folk who pop up on that black screen in the corner of the ground who are no longer with us, who would love to swap places with you. Get living or get dying.

GET DYING

Now I’ve pissed off one half of our fanbase (the moaning bastards) it is time to start on the happy clappers. Or maybe not. The lack of control and power we as supporters have in this is as ever, concerning, but what if there is an evil plan at work? Like I say, I don’t have answers, just thoughts and opinions. There’s two schools of thought out there, and trust me, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about both.

The scaling down of Wigan Athletic is actually deliberate and malicious, or it just disinterest and disengagement. I am prepared to be proved wrong, but everything since day one points to the latter.

Before whole swathes of staff left / were made redundant, I often heard that it would take days or weeks to get a decision on new signings etc, which invariability meant they went somewhere else. Put simply, nobody from the Danson family is actively on speed dial to authorise spend. It’s not neglect, they are just busy running billion pound companies and we are at the bottom of their to do list. In football, you need to be able to say yes quickly, but taking a week to say no is no use at all. You could see it written all over Maloney’s face, Lowe’s face and we are starting to see the same from Gary Caldwell.

The fact that we must have brought in something of the region of £10m in transfer fees and next to nothing has been reinvested is quite frankly scary. If we were being run by fans like Exeter and had no choice because the money isn’t there and we desperately need to pay the wages, then fans would broadly understand. But we’ve seen significant monies come in, we’ve seen the wage bill get drastically trimmed and we are also owned by a very rich man. And we’re not asking him to plough £100m in but a couple of million a year, similar to what the rugby loses, would make us competitive on the field in this division, and at the minute, we don’t look like we are. So what is the plan?

Are we deliberately being run down? You hear rumours that the rugby aren’t happy either, but it doesn’t take much to sweep up trophies in RL. They boast about having home grown players, but as mentioned above, 99% of the rest of the country, let alone the world don’t actually play the game, so where else are players going to come from? It’s a monopoly unlike football, the games are literally a completely different ball game and if Mike Danson and co are unwilling to fund Latics by even a moderate amount, then I hope and pray that they are currently working on a deal to sell the club to somebody who will.

Which brings us to final fly in the ointment, the ground. I wasn’t too hung up about the separation of the ground, as it is a loss making business, and the maintenance costs will only increase as each year passes. The main problem that we as a football club are now subject to the new SCMP regulations, which are based on INCOME not PROFIT. So, even if taking the stadium off our books makes us more profitable, it still diminishes our spending power because we can’t claim the income towards the 50% we can then spend on wages.

The fairminded argument is that it is and always has been a shared stadium, though there are those with long memories like me, who recall it was built for Latics and Orrell RUFC and the rugby joined later when they were stuck with no other option.

Indeed, the fairminded soul in me is quite prepared to accept that it is a joint stadium, which should be an equal partnership. However, the rugby salary cap is a fixed, expense based salary cap, based on costs ie you can only spend so much on wages. The football equivalent is based on income – if we owned our own stadium, we could include some or all of the following, on a sliding scale: rental income from matches, stadium hire, stadium events, advertising revenue, naming rights, catering facilities and on and on and do not need to deduct the associated costs with this. There might be some model in place were we get some of this in the new world (and there better had be and someone perhaps needs to explain what it is as some fans are already starting to talk of boycotting food and drink in the stadium)

Either way, if we can’t count stadium income towards our own salary cap, it leaves us in a very vulnerable position as a football club and explains why our income is one of the lowest in the division. Because a football club needs it’s own ground to generate that income. Maybe it is fair that the stadium is now, in theory, independent but it is this sleight of hand that is hurting us hard much more than it would have done 12 months ago, especially when the owner isn’t providing further funding to offset this. We have no right to own the ground any more given our two significant financial crashes, but knowing how the finances operate, it is hard to distinguish between it being a fair decision or a malicious decision. And whereas there is talk of potentially new owners looking seriously at the club (Again, I have no inside track on this sadly) what potential owners would run the numbers and think “we’ll be fine just renting the ground” if they have any serious intentions to invest and drive the club forward?

Regardless of any concerns of on the field strength, it is this off field situation that is arguably the real issue, and ultimately it will drive on field player affordability. It doesn’t matter whether the rugby club owns it’s own ground – and for that matter there is Orrell and Robin Park to consider in all this – but it leaves the football club in a desperate situation and whereas the pragmatist in me just perceives it as common sense, if the intention is from the Danson family to hold on to the ground at all costs, then we could be in for a long haul and it might not be pleasant.

Yet, for all this conjecture, it’s not as bad as the admin period, where daily phone calls, endless WhatsApps and a constant knot in my stomach every single morning and evening where the norm. We will continue to exist, even if we drop a level. There’s enough of us that have been through the struggles many times before. We go the game, we have beers with our mates, moan about it, then go again the week after. But are we thriving right now? Undoubtedly not. I think the key will be keep hold of Gary Caldwell, no stranger to fire fighting himself. If he ever walks, then we could be in real trouble. Other than Sarah and Brenda, it seems like a lot of good people have now departed who had Wigan Athletic’s interests at heart. And as the stadium and operations staff get more and more intertwined and pushed over to Robin Park, it is going to be harder and harder to re-separate the club again under different owners, should that happen.

And genuinely, I’ve no idea if it will, we’ve had enough rounds of actual and proposed owners in the last few years from Frampton to Fizzy Pop mon to know that the business of buying a football club is over-crowded with chancers, tyre-kickers, bullshitters and frauds. Maybe that it is all there is hanging around currently, lining up to buy the football club now, if indeed there is anyone at all? Maybe there has been a deal from a Norman Smurthwaite type and would you not think Danson would be best to say no if that was the case, actually for the good of the club? With that in mind, maybe it is better to keep our current lot and get on with it? Danson might not be a “good owner” in some fans’ eyes but we’ve had far worse. On the plus side, he pays the wages on time each month, which is a trade up. On the negative side, the off field stuff mentioned above could be seen to have a increasingly worrying undertone to it, as we continue to be stripped bare under the guise of being sustainable?

I really don’t know. All I can give right now is food for thought. And as I go to bed each night, still thinking. It’s easy to forget just how desperate our situation was in 2023. With that in mind, I have to thank Mike Danson for saving our club but if there is a serious bidder out there, someone who is willing to invest a bit in growing the club and the squad, and a deal is on the table, for the club and the stadium, then I pray he accepts it. But is there? Who knows?

I always work on the basis that nobody is coming to save us, but if someone is, then we could well be cracking open the bubbly soon. I seem to recall doing the same in my kitchen during lockdown when Talal took over though and we all know how that ended…..

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