How Wigan Athletic's fairytale unraveled to leave the club fighting for its existence

If Au Yeung Wai Kay had sought to throw Wigan Athletic’s staff off the scent, he certainly succeeded in that. It was only a week before the Championship club was officially put into administration that the owner was signing off costly transfer deals and new contracts it would appear he actually had little intention of funding.

The 32-year-old striker, Joe Garner, got a new one-year deal worth at least £4,000 a week on the same day the Nigeria defender Leon Balogun, also 32, was signed from Brighton & Hove Albion on a short-term contract worth an eye-watering £13,000 a week. Around the same time, the green light was given to pursue a deal for the Sweden forward, Muamer Tankovic, his reputed £15,000 a week wages apparently no obstacle. Paul Cook, the Wigan manager, and his recruitment team must have been rubbing their hands with glee, confident they had an owner who was prepared to back their judgement, do everything to avert relegation and ensure a smooth transition following the club’s sale by International Entertainment Corporation in late May.

Wigan’s locally based executives probably felt similarly enthused. A fortnight or so ago, some of them were walking around the DW Stadium discussing plans to expand the club’s infrastructure with the owner’s eyes and ears on the ground, Szeto Man Chun busily scribbling ideas into a notebook as they talked. Recruited last November as a “football consultant” by IEC - the Hong Kong-based consortium from whom Au Yeung bought Wigan on May 29 - Szeto’s title seemed a little lofty for a man who appeared to serve predominantly as a translator and gofer for his paymasters. Nonetheless, the 45-year-old former Hong Kong midfielder, who played 45 times for his national team, was listed as a club director and had a direct line of communication to the owner.

And yet, by Sunday, Szeto was back in Hong Kong, nowhere to be seen, albeit not quite as elusive as the mysterious Au Yeung. Szeto was still fielding the odd call from 6,000 miles away, reputedly telling those staff wanting answers that administration was “best for the club” right now. No prizes for guessing how that went down at the other end of the line. Still, whether or not Szeto knew what Au Yeung was planning, he is in no way to blame for the owner’s actions and, if anything, just one of the strange footnotes in this modern day football tragedy. “If we weren’t all crying, you’d have to laugh the situation is so ridiculous,” one source at the club said.

Even by the standards of a club that has endured some extraordinary highs and lows, the events of the past week have taken some digesting. The glory days of 2005, when former owner Dave Whelan’s decade long dream of turning Wigan into a Premier League club was realised, and 2013, when the club produced one of the great shocks to beat moneybags Manchester City in the FA Cup final at Wembley, are long gone. But Wigan are still a club with plenty going for it - they own their own stadium and training ground, have a thriving Category 2 academy and possess a first team squad containing an estimated £30 million worth of talent. Sure, the wage bill - which stood at £19.4m as of June last year - is excessive for a club with an average attendance of 11,661 last season and the Covid-19 crisis has presented many challenges but the club was better run than many, in part thanks to the calm, quiet leadership of long-standing chief executive, Jonathan Jackson.

The decision to plunge it into administration, then, made no sense, and not when Au Yeung’s Next Leader Fund (NLF) had acquired it only four weeks earlier from IEC. Indeed, it is a business decision so illogical that many have been left to wonder if there is some credence to claims - aired by the EFL chairman, Rick Parry, in a private conversation with a Wigan fan he did not know was being recorded - that the crisis is in some way linked to “a bet in the Philippines on them being relegated”.

“I neither believe it nor disbelieve it at this moment in time,” says Gerald Krasner of the administrators, Begbies Traynor who, along with colleagues Paul Stanley and Dean Watson, is busy trying to rescue the club.

Something does not sit right, though. Until recently, the same businessman and professional poker player, Dr Choi Chiu Fai Stanley, who had bought Wigan from Whelan in 2018 through his IEC consortium also majority owned NLF. Yet by June 24 - incidentally the very same day Krasner was first asked to look at the case as an administrator - Au Yeung had assumed full ownership of Wigan in a £17.5m takeover that also saw the £24.6m IEC had invested into the club repaid in full. Au Yeung himself admitted on Tuesday he had invested more than £40m. If you are looking for an analogy to describe what happened next, Stanley provided it as he fielded questions alongside Krasner this week.

“You buy a car and run it for two years but then I come along and give you more than you paid for it, collect the keys, drive it straight to the scrapyard and hand in the keys,” said Stanley. “We’ve got 90 years’ experience between us. We thought we’d seen everything but we haven’t seen this before.”

Six days after Whelan’s fairytale unravelled, and just hours after it was confirmed that 75 of the club’s near 200-strong staff had been made redundant, including some of the recruitment team that had been working on those transfer deals, Au Yeung came out with a statement which took Wigan supporters for idiots and drew a swift, sharp rebuke from the English Football League (EFL) after he tried to blame the situation on the coronavirus pandemic.

This crisis does not reflect well on the EFL, and the fury of fans towards the governing body is unlikely to subside any time soon, but it was possible to detect both the simmering anger at Au Yeung’s claims and exasperation at the limitations of the current owners’ and directors’ test that paved the way for this mess in a punchy 955 word statement released at 7.30pm on Tuesday. Au Yeung had some gall blaming the pandemic for his actions when it had been raging for months and football was still suspended by the time he bought the club and, six weeks earlier, the first team squad had agreed 30 per cent wage deferrals in recognition of matchday income being decimated.

As for the much maligned test, for those who cannot fathom why the EFL have yet to overhaul the process, it is not quite that simple. The chaos caused by Covid has certainly slowed matters, and more probably should have been done by now. But clubs also need to vote through change and, while many want to see an end to reckless ownership, there is also a wariness about approving a more restrictive, robust test that could limit future sale options. “You can’t have your cake and eat it,” an EFL source said.

None of which helps Wigan right now, though. Wigan Warriors rugby league club, who groundshare the DW with Athletic, have stepped forward and declared their willingness to buy the football club. It is a bid that has the backing of the local council and probably many fans who would far rather they had local businessmen with the club’s best interests at heart running the show than a faceless overseas investor whose only communication now seems to be through his UK based lawyers and PR firm. Begbies and the EFL are investigating the circumstances behind Wigan’s administration and local MPs are calling for a full-scale inquiry into what they call a “major global scandal”. There are documents purportedly linking Wigan’s Chinese owners to a bankruptcy case in Hong Kong in 2012. What those investigations yield - and how quickly - is anyone’s guess but the tanks are already parked on Wigan’s lawn and the administrators will have to move fast.

Most pressing, for the moment at least, is the £6m owed to non-football creditors, in particular HMRC. The club are appealing a 12-point deduction - which has yet to be applied - following administration but there is the added threat of an additional 15 point deduction if any new owner fails to pay 25 per cent of the money owed to creditors within a specific time frame.

Raising cash to cover that shortfall is a priority and all options appear to be on the table, including the worrying prospect for Cook of his star players being flogged in a firesale and the club’s best up and coming talent being picked off by Premier League vultures.

Keith Harris, the former Football League chairman, has been drafted in to help advise on player sales and Wigan at least seem determined to mount some resistance. Tottenham Hotspur, for example, came in with a joint bid for the England youth internationals, Jensen Weir and Alfie Devine, that was dismissed out of hand. Weir is the Warrington born son of the former Everton, Rangers and Scotland defender, David, and an England Under-18 midfielder. Devine, 15, another midfielder, is three years Weir’s junior but also very highly regarded with sporting pedigree that runs in the family. His dad, Sean, used to play rugby league professionally for St Helens and Devine was named player of the tournament at a recent Under-16 tournament with England that showcased some of the continent’s brightest talents.

Further up the food chain, Cook risks losing key first team players for cut price fees. Antonee Robinson would have joined AC Milan in January in a projected £10m deal only for medical tests to reveal an irregularity with the left back’s heart rhythm. But Robinson has a release clause that would make him available for just £1.5m if Wigan are relegated to League One, as is also the case with midfielder Joe Williams. Milan are still interested in Robinson, as are Watford and West Bromwich Albion.

All the while, Cook has got to try and keep motivated and focused a squad that is not being paid its wages in full. Wigan are currently six points clear of the relegation zone and face Queens Park Rangers at the DW Stadium on Wednesday night but, with a points deduction hanging over them, they need wins.

With so much to contend with, Cook is probably grateful he is mainly being spared questions from the media. The administrators are fielding the questions but it was a rather grim scene in a sprawling suite at the DW on Tuesday morning. The lighting was low, in keeping with the mood at a club that has just been turned upside down, and as reporters were still taking to their seats, each two metres apart from one another, Krasner fired off a 50th non-disclosure agreement to the latest potential buyer - and unlikely the last.

For a moment, though, it was easy to forget the press conference was about the future of a football club. Looking at the branding on the small stage behind where Krasner and Stanley stood, it felt more like an advertisement for their company, Begbies Traynor. Would club branding not have been more appropriate? Still, as missteps go in this whole sorry saga, it was at the bottom of the pile. Krasner talked and those assembled listened. The former chairman of Leeds United gives the impression of a man who rather likes the spotlight but then perhaps that is offset by the more sober tone struck by Stanley.

Either way, Wigan fans are unlikely to care about such details so long as the pair, and Watson, find a credible buyer who can save the club. They certainly seem confident of that but the clock is ticking, and what damage is inflicted in the meantime remains to be seen.