In the 1991 season I went to two football matches. The first game I attended was in my hometown, at Gigg Lane, Bury versus Wigan Athletic. It was an undistinguished game in the old Third Division which ended in a 1-1 draw. Then, later in the season, at the invitation of a friend whose house backed onto the ground, I went to the return fixture, Wigan versus Bury, which also ended in an undistinguished 1-1 draw. It was cold and it rained and I ate an awful pie at half time. This was football just before the advent of the Premier League and a long way from its glamour.
I loved both games. I loved the rain, the cold, the ramshackle grounds and the awful pies. Now, Bury has gone and Wigan is in peril. This is a story of administrative incompetence which might even be described as corruption. It is a story of inadequate owners and rules governing football that are by no means fit for the purposes they are meant to serve. But, more than that, much more than that, it is a story about place and local identity.
The demise of Bury is a tragedy of financial chicanery and regulatory weakness, “a joint enterprise crime” as the now deposed Labour MP for Bury North, James Frith, put it. The chicanery was practised by two unsuitable owners. The incumbent, who has drawn the ire of the fans, is the property speculator Steve Dale, and he certainly deserves some of the opprobrium he attracts. The real villain of the piece, though, is Dale’s predecessor Stewart Day, who used Bury to load up debts which he tried to finance by building accommodation blocks for students. One of his deals had an annual compound interest rate of 138%. Within weeks of selling Bury to Dale for £1, Day had lapsed into insolvency.
Day’s deals were done with suffocating and damaging complexity. He took Gigg Lane, the lovely little ground which had been gifted to the club by the Earl of Derby in 1922, and used it as security for a loan of £3.7 million from a company called Capital Bridging Finance Solutions. Day then in turn mortgaged the club to a company registered in Malta whose own lenders were eight companies domiciled in the British Virgin Islands. The residual loans started to accrue interest at a rate of £1,500 a day, at which point Day scarpered. Bury was left in the hands of Dale, who has been associated in the past with 51 companies, 43 of which went into liquidation. Despite his many promises that the club would not disappear, Day has presided over the collapse of Bury as a going concern.
The football authorities cannot be let off the hook either. There has clearly been a failure of oversight by the regulators. Dale’s takeover of Bury was subject to almost no scrutiny by the English Football League (EFL). It was obvious that he did not have the money to keep the club afloat — that was the speculation among fans from the start — but the EFL procedures for making him prove he had were lax to the point of barely existent. Day was allowed, for example, to appoint himself as the sole director of the club, with no executive board and no oversight. Bury is paying the price of this lack of vigilance on the part of the authorities.
The sad story of Wigan Athletic has some of the same sorry elements. Wigan have collapsed into administration amid rumours — which were cited by Rick Parry, the chairman of the EFL — of a connection with gambling. Once again the procedures of the EFL look woefully inadequate. The mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, and the Wigan MP and shadow foreign secretary, Lisa Nandy, have written to Parry to demand the EFL conduct an investigation and also to ask why Wigan’s new owner, Au Yeung Wai Kay — a mysterious real estate and commodities investor based in Hong Kong — had been approved by the EFL a matter of days before the club fell into administration.
The same complexity of dealing that did for Bury is evident in the case of Wigan. The club was owned for a long time by Dave Whelan, a former player and local retail magnate. He sold out to the International Entertainment Corporation (IEC), which then sold Wigan for £17.5m only five weeks later to a consortium which included Au Yeung. The takeover was announced on 4 June and Au Yeung, said he was “excited to join the Wigan Athletic family”. Last week Au Yeung took overall control and the family fell apart.
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