Quote: Grimmy "Evidently Warner Brothers wouldn't sponsor us for a full season, or not at a decent amount of money at any rate. You can't seriously believe we had the option of someone of that calibre with a good amount of money on offer and IL turned it down. He's a shrewd businessman with a massive vested interest in making money for the club. He will surely have made this decision because it was the best option on offer. It's not like blue chip companies have generally been falling over themselves to sponsor RL clubs, have we considered that it's a very difficult thing to do, and that Emirates was a massive one-off?'"
The criticism isn't that larger offers from blue chip companies have been turned down in favour of this deal, it's that the Wigan RL brand should be able to attract the best deal possible from more notable sponsors, especially the year after we have just done the double. Nobody knows how much this deal is worth or what other offers were on the table, but on the face of it not enough has been done behind the scenes to attract sponsorship. It's also not the first time it's happened (the 2010 replicas being released without a sponsor because the deal with Mecca bingo hadn't been sorted, for example).