Remember when ….

I do understand where you are coming from bicky but i am gonna sit as high on the fence as i can on this one and watch the war from a distance.

The club runs at a loss so transfer fees received are used to keep those losses to manageable levels & to buy replacements
Bill Kenyon did do the same thing yes – he had to. As did Stephen Gage & whatever other chairman we have.
As far as I am aware however (apart from unsubstantiated mud slinging) Dave Whelan has not taken money out of the club to put into his own back pocket or to prop up his other business interests. Something which one of the other chairman mentioned in his letter did do & for which he ended up settling out of court.
Nor has Whelan ever attempted to sell the club’s ground & move them lock, stock & barrell to another town
What Whelan has done is oversee the club’s rise up the professional leagues, help keep us there & build us a spanking new stadium not a hop, skip & a jump from where we used to play
The comparison with Whelan & Bill Kenyon starts & stops with the club having to sell players to fund rebuilding. Its called reality. Quite why you seem to expect & demand the man continues to put his own hard earned cash into the club indefinitely is beyond me

Bicky……you are an intelligent man (I know you are), however, and for the benefit of others here………

That’s not quite how it works – is it? The closest a club can expect to receive in sale fee’s, these days, is around 50% up front with the rest paid – sometimes – over a few years (I am not saying this happens with every deal – just most of them). Therefore, in a fluid cash rich/poor environment what is printed in the press (again) is not what is actually happening in real life. There must be an accountant out there who could probably explain it better and in layman terms ;)

However, Donnys Page brings up another old debating subject….

if we are ‘faffing’ about now – like all other teams – trying to put in place our team for the upcoming season what is the point of having ‘transfer windows’ – for me they can go.

If the club runs at a loss then spending every penny received in transfer fees back out to whichever team we buy replacements from would continue to rack up those losses which would eventuaqlly get to a level that the banks & any other creditors would be unwilling to support. They’d call em in & the club would go t!ts up
I do understand what you’re saying but it isn’t realistic in my opinion. You could argue that if it did happen then crowds would go up & the losses would be less or turn into profits but the persistant increase in crowds to sell out levels would take too long to catch up with the losses
There are many other clubs who have spent 7 years in the top flight & haven’t been “mid table with ease”. There are many with more resources who haven’t lasted even close to that long. The most comparable example to latics is Wimbledon & they always had to sell players & buy in cheaper replacements. They eventually wound up getting relegated coz of catastrophic mis-management at boardroom level
I’m not “happy” watching a team that struggles every season but latics are my side & will still be if we wind up as we were in the kenny Swain era. So will others, whilst others would desert the club. That’s life.
I will also say that the biggest kick in the teeth I’ve ever had as a Latics fan was in Bruces 2nd season when Whelan sold the team out from under him as we were challenging for a european spot coz we’d achieved “our aim” of safety & “needed to build for next season”. I couldn’t see the logic in it then & I still can’t see the logic in why they couldn’t have hung on to that side until the season’s end
That said, this is Wigan Athletic & I want to have a Wigan Athletic to support in another 36 years time and I accept that the club is doing the best it can with the resources it has & that if we get another really good side the best players will be cherry picked by other teams – I just hope that if we have another season like 08/09 that our chairman has learnt his lesson & holds on to em until the seasons end (hopefully the refusal to sell N’Zogbia back in January is an indication that he has)

EDIT – legolad is also right in saying that last season more was spent by the club than it received in transfer fees. This was no doubt done in anticipation of receiving money in this summer for N’Zogbia & possibly 1 other