What as Whelan spent in prem

Heard he’s asked the Wigan chairman how much he’d want to sell the club but that’s as far as it went.

Exactly how much more would you and this ‘lot of other people’ you are going on about be prepared to stump up for your season ticket? What sort of standard of player do you want at the club and how much are you willing to up your season ticket price to cover it?

To help you decide, our current highest paid player is on around £35k per week, I believe. Craig Bellamy – a 31 year old coming to the end of his career – has just joined Cardiff and is apparently on £85k per week. You seriously think that upping the season ticket price a bit for you and you ‘lot of other people’ – and anyway, I don’t think that many of them would join you, to be honest – would cover that £50k per week hike in wages? And that’s just for one player, with nothing like any guarantee of success, of course.

I hesitate to use the word Portsmouth – again – but I think it relevant.

One of the advantages of going back down the pyramid is that at least we’ll go back to being a slightly less public laughing stock.

But I can’t help feeling it could have all been a bit different for Whelan and the Latics. Much as I hate spud-head for constantly unsettling our players (can’t he stick with shopping at Harrods?), he did get us within sniffing distance of European football, made our defence watertight, and attracted a better class of player than Scotland, Gomez, Caldwell, Thomas and Diame. I know that he and his backroom staff came at a price, but there was an air of professionalism and ambition about the club; which I’m just not getting from Bob, Jones and Barrow.

Yes, they’re Latics men. But to a large extent, they’re nearly men. I loved them all as players, Rambarrow especially, but I wouldn’t have fancied pitting them week-in, week-out against some of the best in the world. Bruce shafted us twice but proved to be a much better manager during both spells.

While I haven’t given up all hope of Bob turning things around, Dave Whelan needs to hire a defensive coach right away (Matt Jackson?), and realise that if you pay peanuts you get monkeys.

But remembering that Ruby Wax business documentary about how he ran JJB Sports, I’m not hopeful.

I’m not sure I’d fancy a daft moneybags foreign owner, either. It’s a false economy. There’s only about six teams in any given year going to win anything meaingful at all, so if every club in the Premier League eventually needed a Sheikh Yer-wad behind them to compete, there’d still be 16 owners not getting a return on their investments, and looking elsewhere after a year or two.

A new buyer has to be a good fit, like the Indian fella at Blackburn. Unfortunately for us, there’s not much “old money’ left in Wigan (was Uncle Joe a real person, or merely a cartoon on the tin? ). Indeed, before Dave, all our chairmen seemed to have made their money in the service sector (scrap iron, fruit machines, stationery, holiday companies).

Whelan’s been the only game in town for years now, and he knows it. Given that he was never a Latics supporter (JJB sponsored the rugby for years when we didn’t have a pot to p1ss in; I can’t remember them so much as advertising in the programme; Standish Sports Shops were more supportive), I could see him jumping ship to the egg lot again were there any money to be made from it. Come to think of it, there’s nothing to stop him doing the full switcheroo and making us their tenants if he did.

Of course, such doomsday scenarios will be deferred for a while should we shock the whole of football and beat Chelsea on Saturday. Such a result – and we did it thee times last season – would be enough to remind us that, though they’ve had the odd decent crowd this season, the Greatest Game’s even more on its Rs than the Latics.