EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW I’m running this club how Dad would want... I hope he’s proud of me up there
As Wigan take on City five years after shocking them in Cup final, football’s youngest chairman David Sharpe on being kicked out of university for watching his team and dealing with his father’s suicide
DAVID SHARPE is reliving those first few months. Those months, three years ago, when Wigan Athletic became his kingdom and when eyes were fixed on the country’s youngest chairman. The criticism and judgment of a 23-year-old man running a Championship club, the talk of silver spoons after being handed the keys by his wealthy grandfather Dave Whelan, weighed heavy. It probably still does.
Wigan were sinking without trace in March 2015, suffocated by an exorbitant wage bill and heading for League One. Was their manager, Malky Mackay, worth the hassle after concurrent racism and sexism scandals which Whelan exacerbated before he left? The spoon had tarnished. This was a mess.
‘Sacking Malky was my first major decision, about four weeks in,’ Sharpe says, sitting upright in the Wigan boardroom. ‘I didn’t want to give the impression I was just a kid taking advantage of the position and trying to make news.
‘But the brand of football wasn’t great, the work ethic at training wasn’t really happening. I’m not surprised people questioned me. It’s unheard of at my age. Maybe some felt I rushed into it but I’d been working here for years.’
Four years, in fact, which challenges the misconception that Sharpe was a complete novice when he took charge. He was fiercely opposed to Owen Coyle’s arrival and instrumental in the appointment of Uwe Rosler in 2013. His running of Wigan since has, by and large, been positive.
There have been critics, particularly when staff were laid off due to budget cuts, but the club feels stable even while bouncing between League One and the Championship. It is fundamental to Sharpe that the prospective new owners, Hong Kong firm International Entertainment Corporation, retain traditions. Both he and chief executive Jonathan Jackson could remain in situ if the takeover goes through. They insist tomorrow night against Manchester City will not be their final match.
Whelan has no day-to-day involvement now, making the most of retirement in Barbados, and working for this football club felt like Sharpe’s calling. He was a mascot at the old, rickety, Springfield Park, he played for the academy and he tells a story that both shaped his life and goes a long way to explaining his depth of feeling for Wigan.
‘They say I dropped out of [Oxford Brookes] university,’ says Sharpe with a smile. ‘I might just have been kicked out. I knew I was just passing time really. What I was studying, hospitality business management, I knew I wasn’t going to need. I always had my eye on running this club.
‘So I’d done the first year. Second year was a placement at the Malmaison in Oxford. I missed work on a Saturday basically because I went to see us play at Birmingham instead.’ The best way to put his split with the university is ‘by mutual consent’.
He learned the ropes at Wigan by shadowing members of staff before convincing Whelan he was the man to drive the club forward. That had not been his grandfather’s plan.
‘Wigan was all I knew,’ Sharpe adds. ‘I used to sleep in my Wigan kit. I used to go to the away games with my dad.’
Sharpe was only 11 and at boarding school in Yorkshire when his father, Duncan, committed suicide in October 2002. Duncan was chief executive at JJB, vice-chairman at Wigan and a significant reason why Whelan’s vision was carried out. Sharpe, a pragmatist, does not often talk about his personal tragedy.
‘It knocks you, it changes you,’ he says. ‘There’s no real way of dealing with it. You don’t know how to. You still struggle to come to terms with why and the reasoning behind it. It’s shaped how I am today. It brought us closer as a family.
‘There’s no looking back because he would want me to enjoy my life. I’m running this club how he’d want and hopefully he’s looking down proudly on me. How my mum [Jayne] coped I don’t know. As much as I say I’m doing everything for my dad, it’s my mum who’s kept us together and strong.
‘People don’t realise when I was appointed — that lucky kid at 23 — that it would have been passed down to my dad. I’m just doing the role my family would have wanted for him. That’s why I’m working as I do every day. Everything I’m trying to do and put in place is because of them.’
Six months before his death, Duncan boarded a helicopter to convince Nathan Ellington to move from Bristol Rovers for £1.2m. ‘He flew down to pick him up. Ellington must have been thinking: “What is this? This is League One.” You’re impressed straight away with that, aren’t you? We’d not made a name for ourselves then so we had to splash the cash.’
In the end, Wigan splashed too much. Whelan treated the club as a hobby and, when the parachute payments stopped, felt he could no longer plough his fortune in. Sharpe slashed the wage bill in his first seven months from £23m to £7m.
Key figures from the FA Cup winners in 2013 were sold and the club found itself in disarray after the Mackay gamble failed spectacularly on all fronts. Brave appointments followed. Gary Caldwell was followed by Warren Joyce, who lasted five months after Wigan saw the ‘complete opposite’ of what they’d been sold by Sir Alex Ferguson. Paul Cook now looks set to lead them back to the second tier.
‘The fanbase isn’t a Premier League size,’ says Sharpe. ‘The stadium is too big for us. Great for Man City, and it’ll look great on TV, but we’ll have 8,000 here for Rochdale on Saturday.
‘They’re loyal but that number won’t grow massively. We have to know our limits. Keeping those expensive players could have left the club in a black hole we might never have come back from.
‘We’ve been approached by a lot of people about takeovers in the past. Some are right, some are wrong. It’s about finding the right people and that’s what we think we’ve come across. I’d love to stay here. Whatever happens I’m a fan. I’d go in the away end, boardroom, wherever. I’d still be watching Wigan Athletic because it’s all I care about. We’ll be there at Man City, Rochdale or Scarborough. I still get excited for three o’clock on a Saturday.’
Right now, Sharpe can call on Roberto Martinez, who is acting as an auxiliary scout. ‘We text after games,’ Sharpe says. ‘He blamed the Blackpool loss on City: he thought they had one eye on that. How can they not? It’s only natural. He knows everything about this squad of players even though he’s never managed them. I spent five or six days with him and his wife in Ibiza last summer and all we did was talk football.
‘We’d be on Wyscout out in Ibiza. Gavin Massey at Leyton Orient came up. We did a bit of research, made some phonecalls, got every bit of detail on him and then started watching clips. We signed three on the back of that week in Ibiza. That’s the time Roberto’s got for Wigan and my family and that means a lot. ‘People have started to realise that I do know what I’m talking about. I’ve got good people around me. Eventually people will eat humble pie and I think they’ve done that recently.’