The Wigan Athletic deal that Dave Whelan may always regret sanctioning - it started a chain of terrible events | OneFootball

Wigan Athletic enjoyed incredible highs under Dave Whelan's ownership, but when he came to sell up, it resulted in years of problems for the club.

Dave Whelan was the much-beloved owner of Wigan Athletic, but his decision over whom to sell the club to would end in near-disaster for the club he did so much for.

In most respects, the ownership of Dave Whelan was a dream come true for Wigan Athletic fans. Whelan had bought the club in February 1995, when they were in Division Three of the Football League.

Whelan had been a player himself, famously breaking his leg in the 1960 FA Cup final while playing for Blackburn Rovers, and made himself rich after retiring from playing, first through a chain of discount stores and then through the sportswear retailers JJB Sports - and his experience within the game seemed to benefit Wigan.

A new stadium and financial investment saw Wigan Athletic scale new heights under Dave Whelan

The team's ascent came gradually. Promotions came in 1998 and 2003 before they reached the Premier League in 2005, while they moved into the JJB Stadium in 1999, leaving Springfield Park behind.

And once in the Premier League, they defied gravity by staying there for eight years, even winning the FA Cup by beating Manchester City in 2013.

But the 2012-13 season also saw Wigan's spell in the Premier League come to an end, with relegation confirmed just three days after their Cup Final win, and it's a division they've not been back in since.

In the last 12 years, Wigan's highest finish since has been 5th in the Championship the following season, but there has been four relegations to League One in that period and three promotions - it feels like a long way away from the glory Premier League days, and a Dave Whelan decision may have inadvertedly led to a prolonged period in the third tier of English football.

A bad choice over the sale of Wigan Athletic leads to years of problems

By the end of the 2017-18 season, Wigan had slid down to League One and got promoted back to the Championship, and it was time for Whelan to sell up and enjoy his retirement.

Whelan had already semi-retired by this point, handing over chairmanship of the club to his 23-year-old grandson David Sharpe in 2015, and at the end of that season it was confirmed that a deal had been agreed to sell the club to the Hong Kong-based International Entertainment Corporation (IEC) for £22m. The sale went through the following November.

Wigan finished the 2018-19 season 18th in the Championship, but a big shock was coming the following year. On June 4, 2020, the club was sold again to another Hong Kong-based consortium, this time to Next Leader Fund, with the season not having ended due to delays caused by the pandemic.

But what happened next felt unbelievable. Just a month later, Next Leader Fund confirmed that they would not be putting any money into the club and Wigan collapsed into administration.

It was a stunning moment, all the more so when the EFL chairman Rick Parry was secretly recorded by a Wigan fan discussing rumours related to the club's administration, in which betting on Wigan to get relegated was discussed.

With a 12-point deduction proving enough to relegate them, Wigan were back in League One, but even with the sale of the club by the administrators to Phoenix 2021 Ltd, led by two Bahrainian businessmen, Abdulrahman Al-Jasmi and Talal Mubarak al-Hammad, didn't mean that the club were out of the woods.

They couldn't steady the ship either in the long-term. Wigan won the 2021-22 League One title, backed by some solid transfer business, but in March 2023, and with the club sliding towards an immediate relegation back, the owners confirmed issues with paying wages.

On 9 June 2023, Wigan Athletic were placed under a transfer embargo for contravening EFL tax payment rules, while three days later, HMRC lodged a winding-up petition over unpaid tax, with a hearing date at the end of July - it seemed like it was yet another bad owner for Wigan fans to contend with.

By that time, another sale of the club, to the locally-based businessman Mike Danson, had been confirmed, and the club finally found itself back on an even keel. Their last two seasons have been spent in the middle of League One.

While this is a long way from the glory days of the Premier League and winning the FA Cup, they are at least stable, and are trying to be sustainable, with the sale of academy graduate Charlie Hughes to Hull City last year showing that they're still producing top young talents and they can use that as a business model.

When saving the club in 2023, Wigan fans already knew Danson as a local, hard-working businessman due to his Wigan Warriors connection, and he's more of the mould of Dave Whelan - although Danson is a much quieter figure when it comes to the media.

Dave Whelan's love for Wigan Athletic was never in doubt, and it can only have been a source of great disappointment to him that his legacy at the club ended up tarnished by what happened after he gave up ownership of it - hopefully now though they are going back in a positive direction.