One of the things Dave Whelan is fond of telling people, beyond the fact that he broke his leg at Wembley in 1960, is that on his watch Wigan Athletic came up from the fourth division to spend eight years in the Premier League and ended up winning the FA Cup.
“This has always been a happy club,” he said as recently as Wednesday, when the announcement of Malky Mackay as manager began the distinctly unhappy chain of events that has seen the Wigan chairman roundly condemned for being, at best, a bumbling old fool who does not know when to shut up, at worst an offensively racist stain on the game.
As Mackay said on the same occasion, for one day in May last year Wigan were everyone’s favourite team. For much longer than that they have punched above their weight, lived dangerously at times and been widely admired for their audacity. Everyone was impressed by Roberto Martínez but plenty more likable characters have been associated with Wigan in the past decade, from Jimmy Bullard to Jason Roberts, Paul Jewell to Steve Bruce, Arjan de Zeeuw to Antonio Valencia.
All that has just come to a shuddering halt. As Vincent Tan succinctly put it, harshly though not unfairly: “This is a racist chairman hiring a racist manager. I think he [Whelan] insulted the dignity of all Jewish people. I think he insulted the dignity of Chinese.”
That Whelan certainly did, whether he meant to or not, and no amount of grovelling apologetically in front of TV cameras will alter the perception. In fact putting the Wigan chairman anywhere near a TV camera or a radio microphone seems a surefire way of making any given situation worse. How did it come to this? Who gave the fairy story such a gruesome ending? Whelan himself, by doing what he has done throughout a successful business career, grabbing the bargain first and asking questions later.
There was a reason Mackay was out of work as a manager and most people knew it, even if the FA could have avoided some of the present unpleasantness by dealing more quickly with information they received in August. Many a chairman would have thought twice about the repercussions of employing Mackay, but not Whelan, who simply saw a Premier League-quality manager who might be available at a knockdown price.
If Whelan did not consider Mackay’s text transgressions while at Cardiff to be all that outrageous, his best policy would have been to keep quiet on the subject and refer politely to the FA’s ongoing investigation. But not only did Whelan believe the fuss over his new manager’s racist, sexist and homophobic reputation to be overblown and undeserved; he could not resist saying so. “What he’s done is tiny really in real terms,” he unwisely told the BBC on the night of Mackay’s appointment. “Malky has been so unlucky, he hasonly done a little bit wrong.”
Even Mackay, if his diversity course has been of any practical value, must have sensed that those words were ominous. The Scot makes an unlikely victim, though it is possible to feel something approaching sympathy for a manager seeking his way back into the game after admitting his own failings in a sensitive area, who finds his new employer spouting off about “Chinks” and Jews a day later.
People are saying Mackay and Whelan deserve each other, and perhaps they do. Whether Wigan deserve them is another matter. Wigan supporters, that loyal band who brave insults from the rugby league followers in the town as well as from those within the football community who consider them arriviste and mock their attendances, were simply hoping at the start of the week that Mackay might be the sort of manager to supervise an escape from the bottom three, then a climb up the Championship table.
There were only isolated, individual noises of protest at the appointment. The majority of supporters seemed to think Whelan had made another shrewd move, as long as he was prepared to put up with the flak. They did not bank on him wading in to the controversy to the extent of creating some more of his own.
Maybe an FA fine would teach him a lesson, a diversity course would be even better, a voluntary gag on ever speaking publicly again might be best of all. Whelan has offered to resign should the FA find him guilty, and that would be honourable and effective. But contrary to what some are suggesting, he cannot be forced to sell the club, for the simple reason that no one would buy it. Wigan have been discreetly open to offers for a while but a club that struggled to sell out their stadium for Premier League games are not the most obvious money-spinners, even if they did win the FA Cup. Neither, from a commercial point of view, are they ideally located, between Liverpool and Manchester. Very few people other than Whelan, proud Wiganer and self-made man, would have built the club up to their present or recent standard. Without Whelan, no one outside what used to be south Lancashire would ever give Wigan Athletic a second thought. That used to be a compliment, now it is a complaint. Whelan has soured his own legacy, through foolishness rather than malice, and he has no one to blame but himself.
