I find it quite sad that the knuckledraggers have to create a rivalry with a completely different sport because all the local football clubs have long-established rivals and see the Latics as an irrelevance.

If any of them read this - please note that the position of rivals to Wigan Warriors is not currently available.

Don’t know why they can’t convert the robin park arena into a fully purpose built stadium
Get rid of the Wendy ball pitches and build stands with terraces down the side and behind one set of goalposts with a seated stand behind the other posts and convert the main ( current) stand into a hospitality suite
If we did that the latics lot would soon look at their losses and the owner would eventually get fed up of constantly having to fund them due to the low attendances
Wouldn’t be long then before he bailed out and left them back on their s

Obviously money.

Lenegan seems to think it’s a non starter. I can’t imagine it happening until Danson becomes fully involved (if that ever does happen).

It was that time a few years ago IMO. I don’t mind the DW, it’s not the greatest nor the worst but I believe a club with out stature needs and should have its own ground. Let Latics sink or swim in a stadium too big for them, as proven when they were in the PL. I can count on one hand the amount of times it was sold out for a game. One IIRC was a de facto Man Utd home game when they won the league.

Equally we couldn’t have survived with that stadium as owners. Both clubs mutually needed each other at one stage. I don’t see that need anymore.

At the risk of feeding some kind of idiot troll, this is a meaningless statement.

It's just a stadium. It was built by Whelan for both clubs to share. And that arrangement could have worked. But one half of the deal has such ridiculous delusions of grandeur that they assume they can go it alone without the other half. And now their chairman seems to share this view.

High time we let them put it to the test. But only after we've secured ourselves a new home, which admittedly is likely to take years and years, if it happens at all.

Now is the best time to borrow money to build a stadium with interest rates so low.

We can build a stadium somewhere where it doesn't flood or get boggy, somewhere with good transport links especially rail links.

We can have concerts at the stadium, internation rl games etc.

I've heard a few rumours though, 1 is that the Council won't allow another stadium in the Town and another is apparantly Whelan blocked us building a stadium near Wincanton at Marus Bridge, any truth in these or is it purely a money issue?

If its a money issue how much is a stadium? Ideal place would be where Orrell St James play right next to a railway track and the proposed new link road connecting the M6/M58 junction to Leopold St/Lamberhead Ind estate then purchase somewhere else for OSJ.

General rule of thumb unless you were building something like Tottenham's ground was around £1k per seat so 20k stadium = £20m
Would imagine it's considerably cheaper if you have terraced areas like Saints/Wire which I'd prefer

Saints stadium was £25m all in (backed up by Wikipedia), with an extra 500k or so on top for cladding-gate on top, and an unknown cost for playing in Widnes for a year. The harder thing to calculate his how much effort from the management team went into the stadium over on field management. There’s no doubt the team suffered during the construction (as Leeds are experiencing at the moment) and probably cost us being really competitive in the years immediately after the construction (we were picking up again in 2014, but then KC happened…)

Of course Saints had the sale of Knowsley Road, major buy in from the Council and a major supermarket on board as it was a time of expansion for them. The more complex the finance, the more overall cost likely to be incurred. It wouldn’t surprise me if it were closer to £30m if we tried to do it now. (Closing in on £1.5-2k per seat)

How’s it a meaningless comment? It’s now a soccer stadium that you occasionally play it when things don’t clash with the soccer. If they do clash with the soccer then your fixture has to move, this has happened numerous times as we all know. Who shared Central Park, can you remind me please? Thanks.

You wouldn't have had the stadium if Wigan hadn't agreed to play there too. It's as simple as that, pal.

Yes, DW did sh8t on Wigan a couple of times afterwards, until they finally called him out in law, and then it ended.

Pretend it's otherwise if it makes you guys feel better, but you exist because we allowed you to.

Whelan did not build the Stadium as some people in Wigan seem to think.

The Stadium which cost £35 million was not fully funded by Whelan as his personal financial contribution was only around 20% of the cost with 80% of the finance coming from various grants which included a 14% (£4.9 million) share of Wigan Council.

How on earth could Wigan Council have ever allowed Whelan to own the Stadium when 80% of the cost came from elsewhere and not from his own pocket?

If Whelan had given more than his paltry contribution of only around £7 million, the town could have had a better designed Stadium like many other towns instead of the blan concrete design it ended up with.

As the Latic's were on the up at the time, Councillors on Wigan Council got like you have said, ideas of grandeur that the town would become a big football town like Blackburn, Blackpool, Bolton, Burnley, Preston etc. but they forgot to remember that unlike those towns which had a history of being bigger clubs, it also had unlike them, a leading and famous Rugby League club whose attendances have been better than the Latics for most of years.


From what I was told at the time, the promise of corporate hospality and free tickets for games was the lure for Wigan Councillors support of Whelan.


And why when he sold the Latic's, did he not excude the Stadium from the sale and instead donate it to the Council so that both club had equal rights as it should been when the idea of a joint stadium was first suggested at the meeting in 1994.

A spot on assessment.
Although my concern is this- the Bahrainis know nothing about the history of our town nor our sport. They probably have little to no understanding about what rugby is, apart from their vague perception of union type (Which being in the Middle East they are likely to see as the epitomising posh western English culture. So unlikely to view it favourably as they don’t know what we’re about.

Then add to the mix that the main way they’ll understand our town, culture and sport is listening to the numpties who watch latics! You only have to look at the police statements and the trouble the morons were all causing at Bolton to see that it’s a different breed of folk who watch them. Look at the majority of their fans in the pub before a latics home game...not all but a good 80% are visible simpletons...you can see why they have such issues with the rugby.

So my problem is this. Bahranis will have been told all sorts of nonsense as fact...how we’ve tried to kill their club, how during their recent plight leneghan tried to buy the stadium to bankrupt them etc etc etc. They start to believe the nonsense and think even more poorly of rugby than they did without having any balancing conversations with others or understanding how important we are to the town. They antagonise the rugby and do everything they can to make things difficult. That raises their stock with the idiot latic fanbase. They probably expect that to make them more successful but it does the opposite- it just isolates latics fans to their 7k core as a fraction of strange people with weird ideas. ...I wonder if the Bahrainis know that in the last 5-10 years the latics faithful were singing to opposition fans “who’s the P-ki in your nets!” as they had a Muslim goalie

you’d expect that sort of racism well and truely hidden now

What happens in the next 5 years. We probably end up leaving the ground which makes us weaker. Bahranis believe the latics nonsense that all their problems were due to the Chinese...not losing over a million quid a month as they are not viable as a championship club. They get promoted, wage bills increase again to 18-20 mil a season just to scrap to avoid relegation from the championship and after two or three seasons they’ll inevitably pull the plug again, leaving latics on the brink of extinction and us with reduced support etc at Bolton. So their boom and bust every 3-5 years helps no one...what would actually be better is someone making them a sustainable L1 club bringing through their own players and generating some meaningful pride in the community club.

What really miffs me is all of this could have been avoided had the admins accepted leneghans offer for 3.5mil on the ground! I really don’t understand how they turned that down when it was half a mil more than the bahranis paid for the whole lot. Recognise they took on guarantees for the future losses of the club, but that outcome really hasn’t helped anyone.