DW Stadium

[DaveO]

I think the new Latics owners will have taken that attitude based on Lenagan’s attempts at:

1. Claiming he wanted a Wigan Sporting Partnership (which turns out wasn’t really the case).

2. Flipping the ownership of the ground and then basically saying he wanted nothing to do with football, putting them at risk.

I’m all a bit uneasy about it as since that forum transcript was released you’ve next to no chance of getting many kids to pick rugby as their preferred choice and given people the opportunity to have a Maurice mk2 in the form of Lenagan to continue the rift between the clubs.

Why would the new owners care about that? The Sporting Partnership was an idea that never really got off the ground because it relied on finding another backer that was willing to run the football club. Why would a new owner give a damn about a rival bid once they've won the bidding process.

I've seen all kinds of nonsense from Latics fans calling Lenagan every name under the sun for wanting to buy the stadium, as if it's somehow and underhanded move, and yet it would been incredibly risky not to put an offer in. He owns one of the grounds tenants. He has to do what he can to remove the risk to his club. If the administrators were willing to sell the stadium separately that could potentially be a disaster for both clubs. As long as that was a possibility he had to be bidding.

Lenagan owning the ground wouldn't have put Latics at more risk than Wigan RL are in by not owning the ground. It's not like he'd have kicked the football club out. Doing that would have meant he'd be covering losses of about £2million per year rather than the £500k he has to at the moment. It would be madness. If he bought the stadium Wigan Athletic would still be playing there. He said he had no interest in owning a football club (and who would to be honest - owning a rugby club is bad enough), not that he wanted nothing to do with football.

I don’t disagree with a lot of your points but I don’t see a buyer for Latics without having one other asset in their books, particularly when all the saleable assets on the playing field were long gone. Lenagan owning the stadium and training ground in theory solidifies the rugby future but I think we’d have been left with a ground and no football income. We are where we are now though and I don’t really see a long term future at the DW.

I agree. Had the administrators sold the ground to IL, I think selling Latics would have been very hard if not impossible. It would not have mattered if IL had no intention of making life difficult for Latics.

We’d have probably embed up sole users of the stadium.

That said the administrators first duty is to the creditors so if the money IL offered was going to see the most cash available for creditors they would by law have had to take the offer. Therefore I can only assume the money paid for Latics and the ground was more than IL came up with.