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Wigan Athletic have today revealed plans to resign from the Premier League, after pressure from media outlets and opposition fans.The decision is believed to be prompted by Tuesday night’s poor result against League 2’s Notts County, as well as the small attendance. Officials have also cited the poor playing surface at the DW Stadium, being located near to a previously successful rugby league club, and the employment of Titus Bramble.
The Lancashire club has been targeted by members of the press for criticism over the perceived lack of support in the town, culminating in two sub-6,000 attendances in a cup competition not taken seriously since the last millennium.
‘It simply isn’t good enough,’ said Max Haildon, chief sports writer for the Daily Mail. ‘Premier League clubs should always fill their grounds, no matter who they are playing and what the economic conditions are in the area. Add that to the fact that they failed to beat a team three divisions lower than them, and the thought of resigning is the least they should do. I mean, all the properly big clubs like Liverpool and Manchester United only ever lose to teams from their league, results like the one last night falsify the idea of a ‘Premier’ League.’
Chairman Dave Whelan released this statement: ‘I realise now how foolish I was to think that by having a better team than 72 other League clubs that Wigan would be accepted by the Premier League. Having millions of fans in the Far East and Scandinavia, along with mountains of unmanageable debt are much more important. We have considered this long into the night, and have decided to tender our resignation from the Premier League, and rejoin League Two where we clearly belong.’
Daily Mirror columnist Fran Bollymore welcomed the move, claiming it was a victory ‘for everyone who has supported a big team while they were winning things’.
Also happy was Leeds United director Steve Darvey: ‘This move by Wigan can only be good for British football. Who really wants to see clubs finish in surprising positions? Not me. I’d much rather see all the previously successful teams all playing each other every season, no matter how bad their teams might be.
‘Unfortunately it’s Wigan’s own fault for being founded 40 years after the rest of us, if they had serious plans about staying in the Premiership then they would have been elected into the Football League in the early 20th Century, leaving it to the late 70s is bad management. We can’t just sit around waiting for them to create some history and win trophies. They should have done that when we did, back in the 1960s and 70s. Never mind that they weren’t even a League club then.’
Leeds were one of five clubs reportedly readying applications for Wigan’s Premier League place. Newcastle United, Nottingham Forest, Sheffield Wednesday and Norwich City are also preparing dossiers, allegedly based on the fact that, to quote from a leaked page from the Newcastle report, ‘we have more fans that them’.
Premier League officials are supposedly ready to ignore actual quality on the pitch in favour of large attendances, and one source we spoke to revealed that they hope more teams follow Wigan’s lead.
‘It is true that we’re hoping we don’t have to make a decision between the five applications we have received,’ said the source, who we can name only as ‘John’.
‘We have been in touch with officials from Blackburn and Bolton, enquiring whether they would be willing to follow Wigan down into the lower leagues. At the end of the day, we don’t really care that they’ve consistently gained enough points to get to and stay in the Premier League. As we all know, it’s attendances and performance in the distant past that matters.’
In unrelated news, some Championship clubs and lower Premier League clubs are preparing to dissolve their football teams, in favour of attracting more people through the turnstiles to pacify the Premier League officials. Bez Toxey, Chief Exectutive of Wolverhampton Wanderers, admitted that just playing football simply wasn’t good enough.
‘We have found that people are more interested in other things, especially our female fans,’ said Toxey this afternoon. ‘As females make up 51% of the world population, we’re considering other methods to get people down to Molineux on a Saturday afternoon. The biggest television audiences have been for Britain’s Got Talent, the Superbowl and Michael Jackson’s funeral. Therefore, we’re going to combine the three and begin a tournament to find the person in Britain who can bury Nenad Milijas the best while wearing excessive body armour.’
Other clubs are rapidly following Toxey’s and Wolves’ lead; Middlesbrough have already removed their football team and have replaced them with the Scottish Head Tennis team while Ipswich Town are considering an excursion into Amateur Dramatics, with a performance of Shakespeare’s The Tempest already in production
To be honest, I don’t find it funny. Yet another ‘crowd jibe’.
I don’t give a sh*t about how many fans we have, or haven’t got. I think most fans feel the same. If you got trophies and success on the back of your support, Man City would have a bulging trophy cabinet, instead of a dust-ridden cocktail cabinet. And Wolves? They’d be perennial Champion’s league qualifiers.
I, among with many others, remember when we struggled to get 2 or 3 thousand on. If you’d told me back in 1992 or something, that by 2010 we’d have a Premiership side, playing at a new stadium, against some of the finest players in the world, and Robinho :lol: , I’d have laughed my socks off at you.
Honest to god, what is it they say? “You don’t know what you’ve got….until you lose it”? This last 14 years or so, has been a breeze as a fan. And the fact is, that our home support has grown massively in that time, on an unparallelled scale.
Have you noticed that half the time, it is SKY who are going on about declining attendances? And have you never considered that a lot of it is THEIR FAULT in the first place, with the Live Football saturation coverage?
Vat
I think you’ve misconstrued it. It’s far from a jibe at attendances. It’s written as a Wigan response to those jibes.
Excerpt:
Also happy was Leeds United director Steve Darvey: ‘This move by Wigan can only be good for British football. Who really wants to see clubs finish in surprising positions? Not me. I’d much rather see all the previously successful teams all playing each other every season, no matter how bad their teams might be.
‘Unfortunately it’s Wigan’s own fault for being founded 40 years after the rest of us, if they had serious plans about staying in the Premiership then they would have been elected into the Football League in the early 20th Century, leaving it to the late 70s is bad management. We can’t just sit around waiting for them to create some history and win trophies. They should have done that when we did, back in the 1960s and 70s. Never mind that they weren’t even a League club then.’
It amused me anyway…
Standish….fair enough, realised now! :roll:
I think people have to accept as well, that had we been in the league as long as say, PNE, Burnley, Bolton, etc, we’d have had 12 first division titles under our belt now, along with a Premiership title or two, and 6 FA Cup wins, plus 3 or 4 decent European Campaigns, one of which saw us falter at the Semi Finals against Benfica in 1961.
And we’d also have sell out crowds every week, with a lot of the people travelling in from Scandinavia and Ireland.And then if the crowds dipped, perhaps Whelan would have to ask
“Do the people of Oslo deserve a Premiership club?” :lol:
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