Ever since the start of last season, I have been one wishing defeats against Wigan. Primarily because I had money on them to be relegated. “Their time of overachieving must come to an end” I said to myself, in a less sinister way than it probably sounds. Fast forward then to the end of last season, and Wigan defy the odds and win away at Stoke to escape the bottom 3, after paying a seasons worth of rent to the relegation zone. I lost my money, and I lost my temper. “They’ve got no fans! They don’t deserve to be there!” I remember saying, in a strop at 5pm on Survival Sunday. This view has been echoed by many recently, so, how do we solve a problem like Wigan?
Last night 16,026 turned up to see Wigan v Man City. Over 5,000 of these fans were affiliated to City, meaning just the 11,000 home fans. 9,000 tickets in the home end(s) went unsold, for a local match against top of the league. I’m almost done with numbers, so bare with me. They average 16,056 per game, and as a percentage that is just 63% of the ground that is filled.
Joey Barton took time away from being controversial and moaning about a red card, to make a good point on Twitter. "Wigan should give surplus tickets to local schools or kids homes or something. Better than having plastic chairs IMO!! Or 2 for 1 tickets". For those of you not familiar with internet/text abbreviations, IMO = In my opinion. It's vital the club try and convert the youngsters into Wigan fans, before they are abducted by rugby league.
Barton wasn’t the only one tweeting about the plastic chairs on show though. “Fancy dress at Wigan tonight. Fans turning up as empty seats” was a popular tweet. I smiled at the first one, but by the 127th I knew what the punchline was. I got an overwhelming sense that people were angry that Wigan were in the Premier League, purely based on their lack of support.
There are teams in the lower leagues that could attract well over 30,000 a week if they returned to the top flight. Leeds, Sheffield Wednesday and Derby County being casing points. Derby sold out their ground more or less every week in the 2007-08 season and got a mighty 11 points. So did they bring more (i’m talking metaphorically now rather than literally) to the Premier League than Wigan? Well, they signed some greats of the game, such as Claude Davis, Benny Feilhaber and Roy Carroll, whilst Wigan have only managed to attract the likes of Antonio Valencia, Huge Rodallega and Victor Moses (who was tipped to go to Barcelona, amongst others).
The Latics have done everything right on the pitch since they reached the Promised Land, and credit must go to Dave Whelan for his wise running of the club. Whether you like it or not (and I certainly didn’t like it last season), Wigan deserve to be in the Premier League because they’ve consistently been better than at least 3 other clubs. I suppose we could apply for a new ruling that states that only the best supported teams can be in the Premier League, but that sort of notion thankfully died out in 1945. Just imagine if Wigan filled their stadium every week. More income, more money to go towards players and wages. The likes of Emile Heskey would be flocking back to Lancashire, and the Manchester teams would probably (but almost certainly not) be looking over their shoulders, nervously...
Wigan is a town. A town famous for pies and rugby league. More fans turn up to watch Wigan Warriors than Wigan Athletic. In fact, in 2011 the Warriors smashed all sorts of attendance records for the sport. To put it simply, the people of Wigan would rather watch 20stone men run into each other at speed, than watch 22 people run around a pitch kicking a ”bag of wind” (this particular phrase was used as an insult to the game of football by an old friend of mine).
So yes, it would be lovely, if, when watching Wigan on television, we’d see the faces of some lovely Lancastrians’, instead of thousands of faded blue and red seats, but it’s important that we try not to discriminate against the actual Wigan team, and those that do turn up. Currently, they deserve to be in the Premier League more than the 72 teams below them. So to conclude, there is no problem to solve, and it’s much easier saying that when you have invested no money and are not wishing defeat on them every week.
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