From a visiting supporters view I always enjoy my visit. Although when you play the Wire, it is usually a good crowd. Looks a bit soul-less when you play Quins, Salford etc.

Ideally for an RL stadium, it would be a little smaller with some standing areas. Good facilities and views.

Only thing against renting a stadium like yours is that it gives the opposition something to wind you up about.

Without the bigger capacity we wouldn't be able to get 24k against saints at home. We probably wouldn't have been able to play the WCC there. We could do things like 'the big one' and the st georges day game or the heritage game. There is no way we could have averaged well over 16k without the higher capcity.

Our chairman wants a 20k average over time and I think we can get to at least 18.... can't be done without the extra capacity.

Why don't you just admit you've come on here to start some sort of pi$$ing contest.

Stupid comment, the bigger clubs should be aiming for 15k minumum

Not read all the posts properly so apologies for repeating what's already been said but my take on it is its surely only a matter of time before the Latics get relegated down the leagues again leaving Dave Whelan open to a reduced offer to take the stadium off his hands (then possibly rent it back to the latics when they are in League 1 playing in front of a couple of thousand)

You could then make it your own including converting some of the seating to terracing if its what the fans want

I wouldn't mind that but can't see it happening soon.

I like the idea of all seating anyway and I'd hate terraces to be put into the stadium.

Nice theory but for the probable fact that, even if they do end up as an eventual League 1 club, Latics will still likely be able to generate more money than any British RL club can. Even when all the Premier League glory hunting scumbags have sodded off back to Scum Utd. where their despicable kind belong, Latics will still probably have enough residual core support left to pull in more dosh than the "Warriors" given footie's naturally much greater revenue streams - MK Dons currently keep a similarly sized stadium (admittedly with better money making facilities than the DW) going very nicely on a fair bit less than 10K a match in League 1 for example. And even if Latics were forced to ever sell the stadium on, the 10 million (as a conservative estimate) it would cost to buy would be one hell of a financial burden for any Superleague club, even Wigan, to be able to bear. My guess is it would be more likely to get turned into flats or retail units if that came to pass.

Doesn't bother me I think we should be happy we haven't been turfed out when whelan sold us and the stadium is a brilliant place to be I would like the independence of our own place but happy with the current situation it's only a bit of ribbing from other fans do you think they'd do that if it wasn't better than theirs?

the honest truth is that as wigan are well supported you would need a 22 -25 k capacity stadium, ala the DW, that would cost about £25 -£30 million. With no realistic prospect of a supermarket helping and no massive assets, Wigan (or any club in your position) would be mad to spend that sort of money when they have a stadium of those specs at their disposal already. The DW is a great stadium, more than fit for purpose.

Precisely, the only downside being it isn't ours.

Not sure about that, and their outgoings would be large. As W/L Andy rightly said on another thread "Turnover is vanity". The Latics have very large debts. Uncle Dave could write them off or convert them into shares to improve the balance sheet but even so, this is a club that can't survive in the Premiership in the long term. Sooner or later Dave will not able/willing to prop the club up and the club will slump down to at least League 1. There must be a big risk it will go bump at some stage.

I don't think the stadium would cost £10m to buy from an administrator but even if it did I think IL could find a way of financing it. A phoenix Latics club would need to rent it back from IL as well, don't forget.

Even if the Latics didn't go bust, the dynamic of the relationship would change in a post-DW/post-Premiership era. I think we'd get a far more co-operative approach from them anyway. Here in Sheffield the Blades are very supportive towards the Eagles, there's no reason why a football club and rugby club can't get along and once the glamour of the premiership is out of the equation permanently for Latics I think the relationship would improve a lot.

What are the advantages of our own stadium? Ignoring the costs of buying one, we'd also have to pay for the upkeep and improvements. Whereas we lose some match day revenue and corporate facilities and such like.

But seeing as we have a great deal to rent, surely it's a better option financially overall?

As I have been discussing on the Saints site. At Wigan it is a cost based model in that we pay a very low percentage (10%) of our gate money for use of the stadium. However, we don't pay for things like pitch maintenance & restoration, floodlighting etc.

The disadvantage of course is that we cannot earn the extra revenues from conferences etc which ownership would give us.

However in the coming months there will be interesting developments on business revenue streams for the club which should help negate the fact that we don't own the stadium.

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