Wigan Athletic finished 13th in the English League Championship this season. They lost only one of their last 15 games. However, last week, through no fault of their own, they were relegated to League One. The decision was made by an independent arbitration panel that confirmed the action of the English Football League to subtract 12 points from Wigan’s tally due to the decision of the club moving to “management”, a financial insolvency process where ownership passes to a specialized team of accountants. Instead of 13, the club finished 23, second from the bottom, after the penalty.
This has been a saga by an unreliable non-British owner who discredits an inherited English football club founded in 1932, which has passionate fans and whose academy was considered a hotbed of local talent. For every solid and mutually beneficial investment similar to Manchester City’s in English football, there are several similar misadventures to Wigan.
Barry Worthington, a longtime fan who runs a podcast focused on the soccer club, recalls a gloomy meeting with the club’s chief executive, Jonathan Jackson, outside DW Stadium, its headquarters. “All he could say was ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I had no idea,'” Worthington told The Indian Express.
Former firefighter Worthington is 61, Jackson is nearing 50. “We were crying about football,” he says. For the two grown men, it was not just a melancholic fear of losing something precious in their lives; they felt cheated by a mysterious series of events.
On May 29, Stanley Choi, owner of the Hong Kong-based International Entertainment Corporation (IEC) and a high-stakes poker player who won HK $ 50 million in a tournament in 2012, announced that he had sold Wigan for 17 million pounds to the Next Leader Fund (NLF). Dig deeper and there is intrigue. In May, Choi owned more than 50 percent of the shares in NLF, but in late June it emerged that another Hong Kong businessman, Au Yeung Wei Kay, now held more than 75 percent of the shares. On June 24, Yeung took over and his first decision that day was to stop funding the club. Back and forth accusations (defined by The Wall Street Journal as a form of barter involving a company selling “an unused asset to another company, while at the same time agreeing to buy back the same or similar assets at roughly the same price “) and insider trading developed rapidly.
“Who pays that amount of money and generously pays the money incurred as salary and losses incurred in running a club in these times of pandemic?” says Kieran Maguire, an accounting specialist for association football. “IEC is a Cayman Islands registered company based in Hong Kong and a casino and hotel operator. It is very strange that the IEC share price tripled in June, right after the sale of Wigan Athletic. The number of shares bought and sold went from around 75,000 a day to 35 million! Surely someone has made a great slaughter. ”
Wigan Athletic was relegated to League One due to a sanction awarded to them for entering the financial administration. (Source: Reuters)
Even as fans tried to understand the “sale,” more rumors surfaced this time courtesy of the president of the English Football League (EFL), Rick Parry. In a viral video secretly filmed by a Wigan fan, Parry, unaware that he was being filmed, spoke about his interests in the game. “There are rumors that there is a bet in the Philippines that they will be relegated because the previous owner has gambling interests in the Philippines,” Parry said.
Although the game theory did not stay alive for long, media reports claimed that not much was known about the mysterious owner Yeung. Some even questioned its existence as the internet traces were exhausted rather quickly. Really exist?
“Yeung exists, okay,” says insolvency expert Gerald Krasner, 71, the trustee sent by the High Court. “I spoke to him for over an hour recently on a Zoom call. Some of the speculations that are circulating are wrong. I have seen your passport. He’s not a fictional character, ”Krasner tells The Indian Express.
“I work as a surgeon or an undertaker. You cannot invest emotion in this job. We bury them or save them. Sometimes I bury the same person twice, ”says Krasner of his line of work. In the early 2000s, he was part of a consortium that eventually bought Leeds United that was about to close. This could be his last job, he says. His wife, who had kept him quiet in this high-pressure job, died three years ago and he feels that this is probably the time to quit.
The day he took office in Wigan, Krasner discovered that the treasury was empty. “There is no money at all. The club still had to be managed. ” He called in Caroline Molyneux, the president of the fan club, for a surreal experience of a lifetime. He asked fans to team up with funds to run the club while he searched for a new owner. Fans jumped straight into the raffles and crowd-funded fundraisers. T-shirts and posters of “Let’s Hang on Appeal” were put up for sale.
Wigan was acquired by a Hong Kong-based consortium headed by Au Yeung in June. (Source: Reuters)
They have already raised nearly £ 200,000 and have helped run the club since taking up management roles.
On July 12, Jack Green, whose father was a longtime Wigan fan and took his own life after a battle with depression, decided to bike from Wembley to DW Stadium. It was an act of gratitude that gained 4634 pounds. A week after his father’s death in 2012, he had received a condolence card from then-team coach Roberto Martínez. “As an 18-year-old boy who had just lost his father, this really meant a lot to me,” Green wrote in his fundraising appeal. “In the last few days, I have seen countless stories where the club has helped fans in need of dealing with pain.”
Krasner’s success in his latest job could well make a huge difference in the lives of thousands of fans. Those like Worthington, who have laughed and cried following Wigan. “The night at Wembley when we won the FA Cup was the best time of my life,” says Worthington of the 2013 title. “Before the game started, I looked around, many of us were crying. I couldn’t believe that we from Wigan were there against the power of Manchester City. And when we won, I was stunned. You know, I have children and seven grandchildren, but that FA Cup night was the happiest day of my life. ”
You fear that the manager may not find a new owner, although you have not lost your sense of humor yet. He asks her if she knows any good owners. “There are a couple of potential buyers in Hong Kong,” he says deadpan. Worthington laughs, “No, no, no, they won’t again. Why were they so callous, ruthless? I wonder if we’ll ever know the truth. ”
She is a freelance blogger, writer, and speaker, and writes for various entertainment magazines.