I was having this discussion with a contractor who came into work last Friday & is a Latics fan.
As well as simply blaming the Wigan public for being apathetic, lazy and/or just plain tight (& Bobby’s “style” of football) we both agreed that there were 2 reasons/decisions taken by the club that have had a massive repercussion on the crowds Latics get & it’d be interesting to know what other people think:
1) The decision in the summer of 1996 to hoik up the matchday ticket prices to as much as £35 under the excuse that “this is what most other clubs charge”. I think just at the time that Latics following had reached unprecedented levels & could have kicked on that this knocked a good couple of thousand off our regular attendance & it killed the upward momentum in crowds stone dead. Both myself & the contractor knew directly of people who had started to come in that first premier league season who just turned round & flatly refused to pay the much of a price hike – and they’ve never been back.
2) The decision made by Whelan in January 2009 to order Steve Bruce to dismantle his team, the public declaration that “all our players are available” and the further declarations that “we’ve achieved our sole aim of staying up we need to get the funds in now to build up next season’s squad” & the less than subtle insinuation that that would be our sole aim from then on in. Again, excitement was building up, Latics were 7th & looking good for a possible challenge for Europe, everyone started talking about the next level, other clubs, fans & even the media were praising our players & (IMO) we were playing some decent stuff.
In one fell swoop it crushed alot of people’s ambitions for the club (as unrealistic as they may have been), turned some former regulars away & so I assume turned any new punters away. Who wants to follow a club with no ambition??
That one in particular still sticks in my throat – i can understand Latics needing to sell players to survive & rebuild but I can see no reason why the decision was made that it had to be doen at that time. Palacios could still have gone for big money in the summer as Valencia (whi the club also tried to sell from what I can gather) did & the money we received for Heskey was pretty much what the club lost in prize money for slipping from 7th to 11th. Not to mention the signal that it sent out to our manager & the players whose form noticeably dipped post January
