Wigan Athletic: a football club “in wreckage”
One aspect of professional football that seldom gets the attention it deserves is its relationship to money, said Sam Dean in The Daily Telegraph. While the Premier League relies heavily on “television money”, lower-league clubs depend on the revenue from ticket sales. So if stadiums have to stay empty next season, dozens of sides will be close to bankruptcy: Portsmouth will lose £100,000 for each match that takes place behind closed doors. Many owners will be forced to sell up or go into administration. Indeed, Wigan Athletic has already called in the receivers.
Even by the outlandish standards of football’s financial sagas, the collapse of Wigan Athletic is a baffling affair, said David Conn in The Guardian. The club was once the epitome of traditional ownership. Dave Whelan, who owned it for 23 years, built it up from League Two to the Premier League, where it spent eight seasons before being relegated. In 2013, its final season in the Premiership, it won the FA Cup. But 19 months ago, Whelan sold it to International Entertainment Corporation, an investment holding company specialising in hotel operations and casinos, which last month sold it to a consortium called the Next Leader Fund (NLF). And that spelled doom for the club. Last Friday, the players didn’t receive their monthly wages, nor the three months of deferred wages they were due. And now the club has gone into administration. As a result, it will be deducted 12 points, a penalty that could spell relegation from the Championship, the second tier of English football.
Putting a club into administration less than a month after you’ve bought it is “a world record”, said Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times. It’s also very weird. NLF is “an enigma, wrapped up in a tax haven riddle”. Based in Hong Kong, but registered in the Cayman Islands, the outfit is a partnership headed by “a mysterious man called Au Yeung Wai Kay”, whom nobody at the club has ever met. What’s particularly bizarre, said Adam Crafton on The Athletic, is that Wigan’s finances are basically sound. It owns its stadium and its training ground. If the owners really do need to balance the books, they could just sell the odd player – Antonee Robinson, their young American defender, was “on the brink” of a £10m move to A.C. Milan in January. No wonder people are seeking alternative explanations for NLF’s behaviour. It has even been alleged that NLF’s leaders might have placed a hefty bet on their club being relegated, and needed the 12-point deduction to ensure this would happen.
But the buck doesn’t stop with NLF, said Sam Wallace in The Sunday Telegraph. The English Football League (EFL), which oversees the three leagues below the Premiership (Leagues One and Two and the Championship) is also to blame. Why did it let NLF buy the club in the first place? True, the EFL forces would-be owners to take an “owners’ and directors’ test” to see if they’re suitable, but it’s basically just “a self-certification exercise”. Why are the standards so lax? Because the 72 teams that make up the EFL know that “the more they tighten the rules, the more they narrow the field” – and the trickier it then becomes for any owner wanting to sell their club. “Never has football needed more protection from its own worst instincts.”