Wigan Athletic: The 12th Man part 1 - 'Like many Wiganers, I’ve never been much of an optimist, and I’m certainly not one who looks to sky fairies for the answer, but I’ll consider selling my soul for a solid and resilient resolution to all this...'

Caddy from the 5:

Well the new season is upon us and, at the time of writing, we don’t even know if we’re going to be allowed to even start the season! We should do, because the admins said we were given permission from the EFL, only to say 24 hours later they were meeting them to seek clarification. I’m really biting my tongue writing this, and trying to put a positive on ANYTHING Begbies have actually got right. The lack of information being relayed back to the fans who – along with players, ex-players etc have raised nearly £1 million for OUR club – is head scratching. Gerald Krasner drip-feeding wannabe journalists on Twitter, Paul Stanley picking arguments on talkSPORT with Simon Jordan (who was bang on with what he said about their fees), the Supporters Club being told stuff that they can’t tell the fans...it’s all a load of rubbish. We, the fans, have sat on our hands and watched these men strip anything and everything that was left after the Choi/EFL debacle and, as far as I can see, they’re doing it for one thing – to line their own pockets. These men care not one iota for Wigan Athletic. Remember, the Chinese approached them to get what they could. Selling players at grossly undervalued fees and Euxton to keep the club afloat you can just about swallow. But now we’re hearing rumours – because that’s all we get, rumours...oh sorry, not forgetting the weekly updates that actually update nothing from the admin – that the price is a sticking point. But how can you keep selling assets and still want the original price for something?? Krasner keeps telling people not to believe what they’re reading...WELL ACTUALLY TELL US SOMETHING THEN. Not just pacifying some kid on Twitter with a few easy answers that the gullible fall for. This whole sorry situation is doing in the head of me and every single Wigan Athletic fan. We need to just move on in whatever capacity we can and put a line under it. If there’s bids on the table, which we believe there are, take ‘em! And stop trying to rinse every single penny you can out of a club that doesn’t deserve any of this. The fans don’t deserve this, because when these clowns walk away with their pockets stuffed it’s us, the fans, that will still be stuck around to pick up the pieces. Just give us OUR Wigan Athletic back...it’s not yours to play about with. I’m off for a cow’s mouthful of ‘Bow and wait to see what rubbish is filtered through today...

Paul Middleton:

They say no news is good news but, when you support a team who are supposed to play their first league game on Sunday and none of us yet know if we’ll even make it that far, no news is quite possibly the worst news we could be getting. One of two things is currently happening around the sale of Latics and the stadium. Either there genuinely are no serious bidders willing to put up a ridiculously low price for a club with Latics’ recent history, or the administrators have no intention of encouraging a deal so as to get the result they want, rather than we need. Figures released earlier this week tell us Begbies Traynor stand to gain at least £1.3million in fees from their role in the seemingly endless administration we find ourselves in. That’s roughly £130,000 for every week since Kenneth Way and Stanley Choi decided it was easier for them to pull the plug on the club than to try and win back their losses in a backstreet Hong Kong poker game. Everyone, it seems, is determined to bleed Latics dry for their own profitable ends, not caring a bit what ultimately happens to the football club which they have all supposedly been guardians of. I’ll be honest, it’s looking bleak. Whatever comes out of the EFL meeting in which it will be decided whether or not we can actually start the season in administration. With Nathan Byrne the latest to leave the club for a bargain bin price, we may nominally have a club, but we’ll soon be without a team. As good as our youngsters are, they will not withstand the rigours of a 46-game season against seasoned professionals. They will get kicked to bits, and run ragged to the point where it might even cause some of them to question if they want to be professional footballers. Bolton were in a similar position, where they had to play their kids every week, and it was akin to ritual slaughter every time they turned out. But turn out they did, and we have to at least hope we can do the same. To go from being the best team in the Championship to the brink of extinction literally overnight is as heartbreaking as it is rage-inducing. But that was in June. Now here we are in September, still living day to day on a Gerald Krasner-branded life support system. It is Krasner who, ultimately, will decide whether we survive or not. That terrifies me, and it should terrify you. He has little or no interest in whether Latics survive or not, he’ll just take his money and continue to give ours away. But we have no control over that, so we’re left with ever-diminishing hopes that a white knight will ride to the rescue. Even one who just gets us out of this mess for the immediate future will do, to give us time to at least stabilise and look to the next move without the spectre of liquidation hanging over us. Like many Wiganers, I’ve never been much of an optimist, and I’m certainly not one who looks to sky fairies for the answer, but I’ll consider selling my soul for a solid and resilient resolution to all this.

Martin Holden:

We are now just a few days away from the start of the 2020-21 EFL campaign and as, I write this, we still don’t know if we will be allowed to start the season. It pretty much sums up the absolute dire straits that the club is in right now. Complete chaos with the fans in the dark, other than snippets of ‘maybe’s’ from a journalist, who I have to say has been pretty spot on throughout all this. Hopefully, the team will get to start the season, but with the “rules is rules” mantra of our friends at the EFL, who knows! I have just read Nathan Byrne is sealing his move to Derby and of course, we wish him well – he always gave everything for Wigan when he played and as the season progressed he got better and better. One of many that would have formed a formidable group next year if our old friend Stanley Choi hadn’t got bored. Yes, let’s not forget about Choi in all this uproar. It’s easy to get distracted with the Admins and their actions, it’s easy to get distracted with the fundraising that has gone on, it’s easy to get distracted by the inefficacy of the EFL. But never ever forget in all this the role Choi has played in the absolute destruction of the football club. He is the real villain here. As Sam Morsy is about to leave, you have to feel the agents of Kal Naismith, Tom Pearce, Lee Evans and Joe Garner are probably out there banging every door they can. They are all Championship players who have just taken a 50 per cent wage hit – no way would they stay if they have an option to leave, and no fan of Wigan Athletic would begrudge them going either given our current state. Will we get saved? As a complete package, I don’t think so. But as a club on its own, I think that is the most likely outcome here. It will, however, depend on a non-footballing entity taking on the DW Stadium though. That will probably be OIan Lenagan, I would guess, and that opens up another can of worms. But it is in his interest to be sensible, and the RL world cannot live without some other income in that stadium either. If we do get saved, then we are right up against it next year. We’d be really strong favorites for relegation, but it does mean a chance to stabilize the club and look to the future – living as sustainably as we can and involving the supporters – and I think we would all take that right now. My final line has to go to all the players and ex-players who have contributed to the Supporters Club fund. A great gesture from them, all showing what an amazing little club we have here and how they all appreciated it. But special words of recognition have to go to Victor Moses for his £20,000 donation. That is absolutely outstanding.

David Perry:

At the time of writing I am not sure when this travesty will end. No agreed owner, and players being offloaded in a firesale that we were promised would not happen. The narrative so far has involved dodgy owners, an incompetent governing body, and ruthless administrators. These characters are more than pantomime villains, as they have collectively taken our club to the brink of liquidation. No-one saw this coming but, since the end of the Whelan dynasty, many of us have had a niggling feeling that something was not quite right. Losing a generous local benefactor was always going to be a tricky path to navigate, as our small club with limited resources was always going to face a stern test. This is a story waiting to happen to several, maybe many, other clubs. The exact circumstances may differ but the end will be the same. Almost any club outside the Premier League could face the same fate as Bury. It should hardly be a surprise given the basket case economics of football. Someone once coined the phrase ‘the unacceptable face of capitalism’ and football is now a grotesque money-mad cesspit that overshadows even the game itself. The most stark example of the rich getting richer at the expense of the rest. The roots of this run deep. Back in the 1980s, the football pools paid handsomely for the rights to use football for their coupons. The money was divided fairly across all the clubs irrespective of their size. The big clubs objected and demanded the lion’s share - and got it. Despite requiring no extra talent to be on a coupon, this was the start of a reversal of Robin Hood. The fact big clubs needed smaller clubs as opponents was lost on them. The next money-and-power grab was gate receipts. Once again, the mighty clubs in the land demanded to keep the entire home gate money. This has some merit when, say Manchester United could get 60,000 crowds compared to then top-flight Wimbledon on around 8,000. While economically understandable, the redistribution of wealth went too far and the ‘I’m all right Jack’ attitude set the standard. Next gamechanger, literally, was the breakaway formation of the Premier League in 1992. There was no actual breakaway, as the new division was still under the auspices of the FA - but out of the clutches of the Football League. Up to this point, TV had got football on the cheap, and leading lights such as Brian Clough liked to point this out. The marriage of the Premier League and Sky was confirmed and, while not quite unleashing a monster, this new union was always going to have unintended consequences down the line. Football has been awash with TV money ever since. At the same time, fans have still had to pay very high ticket prices, and all the new-found wealth has ended up mainly in the pockets of players and agents. I don’t begrudge players getting the best deal they can in what is a short career. The pendulum has, though, swung too far, and average players are multi-millionaires. This has an inflationary effect on wages in the Championship, a league where many bigger clubs and so-called sleeping giants throw the financial kitchen sink to get back in the Premier League. Sooner or later, this storm was going to engulf Wigan Athletic in one way or another. Not in the underhand way that we face now perhaps. However, small clubs with small fanbases can’t compete financially in this arena. Yes, we could keep treading water by selling players as clubs have always done, but not for much longer. I don’t usually feel comfortable advocating pay-cuts for anyone, and I know the PFA has a job to do. But the economics of this madhouse can’t continue. Well-paid players, yes. But not so overpaid that it could ultimately sink a club. Even if Choi and his cohorts had never existed, there would have been a day of reckoning of some kind. So unless we get another Whelan and a swift return to the top flight, we will have to cut our cloth accordingly. Add Covid-19 to the mix, and the picture becomes even more scary. We need to find a way out and we will. Time to write another chapter, administration willing. Hopefully with a mix of hungry, young hopefuls and seasoned pros on decent but sensible contacts. We will see.

Statto:

Groundhog week, no news, bad news, depressing state of affairs. I’ve come to the stage I don’t believe a word that comes from the administrators or from a certain journalist from a national newspaper. Depending on the outcome of the EFL meeting, we start the season off at Ipswich on Sunday, with a mixed bag of players who will no doubt put the effort in no matter what, but football doesn’t seem important when the club’s life is on the line. And my thoughts on the rumoured Leigh move? They can’t be repeated in a family newspaper. Stay safe.

Sean Livesey:

Where to start? The kicks, the punches, the blows - they keep raining down on us. Week 10 of administration and we are seemingly no further on to finding new owners than we were at the start of July. But here we are, a day away from the EFL season beginning, and just two days away from our trip to Ipswich. If it actually goes ahead that is. One of the few things to come out of the administrators press conference at the end of August was that we would write to the EFL to ask to be allowed to start the season. That was on Thursday, August 27 and, at the time of writing, we still don’t know whether we will be travelling to Ipswich on Sunday, and whether the EFL will allow us to start the season. This despite both Gerald Krasner and Paul Stanley saying that permission had been granted in interviews earlier this week. A statement on the club’s official website seemed to say otherwise, though, explaining the EFL had received our request to start the season and ‘would discuss it later this week’. The administrators also said there would be no firesale and that we would be better off in League One. So y’know, maybe the administrators aren’t the best people to listen to on this. Away from the trials and tribulations of whether we can actually start the season, there has been more conjecture and misleading statements from all sides as the grapple for control over our beloved football club starts to get even messier than it was a few weeks ago. A second bid was placed for Wigan Athletic and Christopher Park by the French American group led by Gauthier Ganaye, which was rejected out of hand as the administrators want to sell it as a full package. The full package including the sale of the DW Stadium, which covers Wigan Athletic’s legal fees and fees to the administrators. It may have seemed a good idea on Kranser’s part to price up all the property separately from the club. If a successful sale was to go through, and the properties asking prices were realised, the administrators would have successfully sold the club and realised the top end of what they were due. Sadly it seems most buyers have baulked at that strategy, indeed the only set of bidders that we have heard from throughout all of this have suggested through the national press that their back-up option was moving home games to Leigh. I don’t see any real mileage in that, other than to force the hand of the administrators. Numerous bidders have either walked away or refused to pay what the administrators value the stadium at, so there must come a time where that pricing is re-assessed. If not, liquidation will follow and, with it, 90 years of history. Although it caused much anger across social media earlier this week, I can see why American businessmen would think the DW is not worth paying for. With the latest developments in the pandemic, the turnstiles could be closed for a lot longer than originally envisaged. Add to the fact the business rates, the upkeep and maintenance of the stadium, and all other associated costs fall directly on to Wigan Athletic, it’s a major investment to make when someone else (Wigan Council) have offered the use of a perfectly adequate stadium in the same borough for a fraction of the cost.

Please don’t get me wrong, I do not want to play in Leigh and would actively campaign for us to remain in the town of Wigan. But from someone bidding for the club from outside of the town, why would you pay £3million plus for a facility that doesn’t make a profit in normal times (£1million-plus losses over the last three years), let alone during a pandemic? So despite not wanting to move, I can see why someone else may have thought it a sensible option. Along with moving to Leigh, selling more players and every other bit of drama associated with Latics this week, we’ve been linked with not one but two new managers. Simon Grayson and John Sheridan, hardened League One pros who I imagine would be brought in to help out Leam Richardson, who must feel like the violinist on the Titanic, playing until the waves hit. Whether either wants to join us is another thing.

We got a taste of what next season could look like against Fleetwood on Saturday. Two early goals gave way to a tired looking performance, as our youngsters faded in the second half with Fleetwood managing to overturn that two-goal deficit. If we are to start the season, we need bodies in soon. Be that players or be that coaching staff to take some of the pressure off Leam. A group of fans have announced there will be a peaceful protest (following current safety guidelines) in Manchester, outside of the offices of Begbies Traynor. Whether you agree with that approach or not, we can all agree this is an extremely frustrating and indeed distressing time for all us fans, and the longer it goes on the less we have left to salvage. People are desperate for their voices to be heard before it’s too late. If we do manage to start the season, it certainly isn’t going to be pretty. Let’s hope the dark clouds part soon, and we can finally get some good news. Lord knows we’ve waited long enough.