thats a biased blinkered opinion that mate im a wire fan and it grits me to say wigan are still a world famous club

Yes , and so are Widnes RL and Leeds United in football !

yeah notts forrest liverpool etc you never lose the tag of being a big club

Wigan the only full time pro team from 1985-1995????? where's the proof of this? Wigan turned full time pro in the summer of 1991 ahead of the 1991-1992 season. Leeds also turned full time pro time pro the same summer.

Read a book written call Mud, Blood and Glory(i think its that one) chronicling Wigan's season of 1990/91 where part of the book is the writer going visting the players in their day to day jobs and spending time with Maurice Lyndsay as he constantly is looking for improving income streams and sponsorship to bring in necessary funds to help the Wigan players become 'full time' in readiness for the 91/92 to help complete with Leeds who had already announced this transistion. Its pity other clubs didn't have owners/chairman with the same motivation to improve their clubs and instead just relied on the fame of Wigan to bring in Sky Sports money to help them.

IN a nutshell, Wigan only play at the DW Stadium because Dave Whelan got funding(approx 50% of the cost of the stadium) as long as it was a multi sports stadium. Dave Whelan had stalled on plans to build this stadium just for Wigan Athletic because he didn't get the funding - without Wigan RL.

What contributed to Wigan losing Central Park was because the RFL pulled the rug from under Wigan's feet by reducing income streams - reduction in home league games from 15 to 11. That's four less 14,000+ crowds a season. Scrapping of the Lancs Cup, an almost annual 3 or 4 matches of income and prize money, scrapping of the Regal Trophy, again almost guarenteed revenue streams per annum. Of course shoddy leadership from Jack Robinson and co didn't help, they sold Central Park when their was alternatives. Whelan offered around £4m to turn Central Park into a 20,000 all seater stadium(the photos and plans bring a tear to the eye) but Tesco offered £11m to turn it into a car park and the rest is history.

If Wigan aren't the biggest team in Super League, who are?

In a nutshell,you pay rent and If Whelan tells you to play somewhere else for the week,you do.

Oh and you aint even the biggest team In Wigan.

Idiot.

Shaun Wane was brilliant in the film 'Congo'.

I am looking forward to Leeds Utd vs Wigan Athletic

You lost a few minor games and GAINED at the same time the millions of pounds of Super League funding in place of a TV deal which brought virtually no cash in. Both Wigan and Leeds were living beyond their means in the 90s. Leeds could afford it - they found the money one way or another but didn't generally make money. Wigan could afford it because they kept getting to finals and reaping the profits from that and from winning things - when that particular run came to an end, so did the business model.

What a complete end of a bell you are, Wigan's success in the 90's sent them bust and Central Park had to be sold to keep the club alive. Get a grip man.

I'm glad there are people like you on RLFANS that were close to the situation at the time and can give us all the facts

Any time a team wins a lot of games - like Wigan generally do, or better still, lots of competitions - like Leeds and Saints generally do - then fans of said teams can generally be forgiven mentioning the fact that their team is doing well. Fans of other teams will therefore delight in calling them 'arrogant' when said team loses a game, or doesn't become one of the two out of fourteen to make the final. Ridiculous, but hey.

Wigan and Leeds are by far the most important teams in SL, for the simple reason that those two locations produce the largest chunk of talent which the rest of the League rely on. As a completely biased fan, I'd argue that what Wigan has acheived, in terms of the interest and participation in the sport around the local area, is more impressive, simply due to the smaller population - no other club in the Northern hemisphere has a comparatively large effect on the local interest and participation, relative to "catchment area". I tend to judge whether a team is 'big' by imagining the overall effect (both on SL and the game in general) if they disappeared. No, I'm not so blinkered as to imagine the loss of Wigan would finish RL, but as far as which club would be the biggest loss, only Leeds could make a reasonable case to be up there with Wigan. Please don't take that to mean a lack of respect for other massively important teams - the loss of any team is a tragedy, but if its about ranking them in order, then Wigan and Leeds are top of the list, I think in that order.

As for the competition, it's true that we (in general) only make these points when a loss by our own team brings it into focus, but I think we do have an issue regarding the playoffs. I totally accept that at the start of the season you play the competition as its structured - I'm not going to claim we were the best team by finishing top there, because finishing top wasn't the prize, so tough. ....However....there's a growing problem going on here: It's becoming clear that the regular season is significantly less important. Like it or not, its something we might be able to live with if the playoffs were generating spectacular interest, but look at the attendances - terrible - even last night's crowd. So what we've got right now is an 'unimportant' regular season, followed by matches that people don't seem to care much about.

Can't be right.

Wigan Athletic DO NOT own the DW Stadium. They pay rent there just as Wigan Rugby League do to the owners Whelco.

game over