Why the payday for Wigan from the Arsenal game, can’t come soon enough

 

 

• Arsenal v Wigan in the FA Cup – how big a threat might Wigan be?
• What makes a big club? And who is to blame for Tottenham’s demise?

By Tony Attwood

Wigan’s last six league matches make a sorry sight – with five defeats and one draw.  All the games in the table below were played in League One.

Date	Game	Res	Score
17 Jan 2026	Wigan Athletic v Bolton Wanderers	L	0-1
24 Jan 2026	Doncaster Rovers v Wigan Athletic	D	3-3
27 Jan 2026	Wycombe Wanderers v Wigan Athletic	L	2-0
31 Jan 2026	Wigan Athletic v Lincoln City	L	0-1
07 Feb 2026	Peterborough United v Wigan Athletic	L	6-1
10 Feb 2026	Wigan Athletic v Reading	L	1-2

 

Yet this compares with an earlier run of League One games in which the side won three and drew three, and although the goals tally wasn’t that wonderful being six goals for Wigan and three against, they were picking up the points…

 

Date	Game	Res	Score	Competition.
18 Oct 2025	Wigan Athletic v Port Vale	W	1-0	League One
25 Oct 2025	Mansfield Town v Wigan Athletic	D	1-1	League One
08 Nov 2025	Exeter City v Wigan Athletic	D	1-1	League One
22 Nov 2025	AFC Wimbledon v Wigan Athletic	W	1-2	League One
29 Nov 2025	Wigan Athletic v Stevenage	D	0-0	League One
02 Dec 2025	Wigan Athletic v Burton Albion	W	1-0	League One

 

So what has caused the change, and indeed what brought on the crisis?  The answer, as so often occurs, is financial in origin.   The club, as we noted in the last article, had a spell in the top division, but then fell downwards and perhaps didn’t sort out its costs to match its declining income.  This led to a financial crisis with revenue dropping from over £54m a season down tounder £12m a season.  Losses mounted to over £9m.

And this is the great problem of football.  Club owners tend to work on the basis that the current level of income will continue or indeed even grow, as that is what supporters and the local media demand.   Indeed, there can be major local repercussions if it is argued that the board has no ambition.   

Now “Ambition” is one of those words that people who have never run a business throw around, as if investments can be made without any thought of the consequences if everything doesn’t go according to plan.   But if the board do try to go for ever more growth and that doesn’t happen, then income drops and losses rise – with no obvious way of clearing the debts and reducing the losses.  Players are, after all, usually on four-year contracts which guarantee them a salary.

What can also happen, and what happened to Wigan Athletic, is that the ownership then changes.   In this case, the club was bought by an organisation based in Hong Kong, and there have been negative comments made about how those owners have dealt with matters, although, of course, I have no way of validating such matters.

However, the problem as reported can be summarised by the fact that Wigan were spending over one and a half times their income just on salaries by 2018-19, and the question quite simply is, how on earth is a club like Wigan supposed to cope with that?   Especially when the owners are on the other side of the world.

Inevitably, money began to run out, and the Leagues have a very interesting way of dealing with this.   If a club starts paying its staff late, the League, rather than helping, makes matters worse by deducting points!

An alternative could be to incorporate a rule that says that a club to continue must not pay (for example) more than 80% of its income in salaries, and must keep £10m (just to pick a number) in the bank to cover this.   If it doesn’t, then the directors have to give personal guarantees of money, which is in the UK.   If not the club is expelled.   That way, there would be no argument, no gambling on future results.   The moment the money in the bank drops to below the declared level, then out goes the club and the directors personally lose out.

And if there is a worry that clubs will get around this by using the bank owned by a director who might tell porkies about how much money he has, a bank nominated by the league could be used, with the rule that the League has access to the data from the bank, but must not reveal it to anyone else.

Instead, Wigan ran out of money, were late paying their players, and so had a points deduction – which of course doesn’t help the club resolve financial matters at all.  It’s a bit like throwing a debtor into a debtor’s prison in the old days.   It’s retribution, but doesn’t actually get the money paid.

Yet all of this could have been avoided, since it was obvious that as the club’s salary bill went up approximately 400% between 2013 and 2019, but the crowds did not.(And incidentally, it is not because Wigan doesn’t have a big ground.  It’s ground is about twice the size of Brentford’s.

But as things stand, the club is now in the relegation zone of League One, meaning there is a fair chance that next season they will complete the journey from the Premier League to League Two.

There is of course, far more to the story, and some of the owners (and I stress I am not writing of the current owner here) have possibly been involved in action they should not have been involved in.  But Wigan now have a local owner, and maybe things are getting back on track.   But their tale, which of course you can read about in depth on the internet, does suggest that big-money buyouts of smaller clubs might not always end up as the fans hope.  Indeed, one day even Tottenham Hots could run out of cash.