SHAUN HAS EYES ON PLAY-OFF TILT
THIS season isn’t even over, but Wigan Athletic manager Shaun Maloney has already challenged his young team to reach the League One playoffs next term!
Relegated from the Championship in financial disarray last year, the Latics began the current campaign on -8 points after repeatedly failing to pay wages on time under previous owner Abdulrahman Al-Jasmi.
But a takeover by local billionaire Mike Danson saved Wigan from administration and Tuesday’s 2-2 draw at Charlton effectively secured survival with three games to spare.
“I couldn’t be prouder of the players,” says Maloney, who won the FA Cup with Wigan in 2013 and returned as manager in January last year. “I think they’ve been a massive credit to themselves and to the club.
“The points deduction wasn’t something you could just speak about at the start of the season and then put to bed. It’s been a constant battle. It magnifies the knocks, and makes every defeat seem bigger.
“It feels like you’re constantly pushing uphill, so I’ve had to be a bit more patient than I would be under normal circumstances. That’s especially because we’ve used a lot of younger players, who need a bit of space to make mistakes.
Different
“But next season will be different. There’ll be no excuses. I’ll demand more. This season, we got to 50 points with seven games remaining. To be completely honest, the level of the team dropped after that, and I didn’t like it.
“What I’ve said is that if you’d added those eight points back on with seven games left, we’d have been five points off the play-offs.
“So can we improve on that? When the March international break comes round next season, can we be less than five points off the play-offs? That’s got to be the target now.”
Maloney also paid tribute to Danson, a data guru and publishing tycoon whose arrival in June staved off a winding-up order, banished a transfer embargo and eradicated over £6m worth of debt.
“What’s not really been mentioned much is that our owner came in and immediately paid off all of our debts,” said the former Celtic and Aston Villa midfielder.
“There wasn’t a settlement or a CVA with a certain amount of pence in the pound. There was no attempt to shortchange anybody.
“I know other clubs in similar positions have done things differently and there are often reasons for that. But our owner deserves a hell of a lot of credit because a lot of that money was owed to businesses around Wigan. Local people, our own supporters.
“Six million quid is a huge amount of money for anybody and it’s only since our financial records for last year came out that I think people realise what an incredible impact he’s had.”
History
Wigan’s recent history is littered with financial problems. In 2020, the Latics were docked 12 points and relegated from the Championship after Au Yeung Wai Kay - who had bought a controlling stake just a month earlier - put the club in administration.
Al-Jasmi’s Phoenix 2021 group took charge in March 2021, but after losing more than £7m winning promotion from League One in 2022, the Bahrain-based consortium ran out of cash. It is why, despite talk of a return to the Championship, Maloney, below, has warned supporters not to expect a headlong tilt at promotion. “We’re on a journey,” said the 41-year-old Scot, who has previously worked as an assistant to Roberto Martinez with the Belgian national side. “And it might not be as quick as under previous regimes when we outspent everybody else in the division. We’ve seen where that leads, and nobody wants to go through that again.
“But that doesn’t mean we aren’t ambitious. It might not be next season, it might not be the year after that. But the owner here will get it right.
“He will get us back to the Championship, and it will be in a more sustainable way than what’s happened before.”