July 9 – The head of the English Football League has broken his silence on the collapse of Championship club Wigan Athletic pledging to get to the bottom of why the club was plunged into administration when its Hong Kong owner pulled the plug on further funding.
Rick Parry, the former Liverpool ceo, has confirmed that the Next Leader Fund group which recently bought Wigan did pass the EFL’s “owners’ and directors’ test” and that he was therefore stunned by the decision to call in the administrators.
“It was a tremendous shock – a bolt from the blue,” Parry told the BBC. “Normally if a club is facing administration, you get warning signs. Generally … there are problems with creditors and it happens gradually.
“It is really unprecedented for an owner to put his own club into administration, literally overnight. It is completely unprecedented for an owner who has only just acquired the club for £40m to put his prized asset straight into administration and therefore destroy its value to him. It makes absolutely no sense to us – it’s a real mystery. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”
“We want to try to get to the bottom of this because, on the face of it, the Wigan staff, the fans, the players, the town… English football has been treated with disrespect in this.”
Owner Au Yeung Wai Kay insists he took over control of the club from International Entertainment Corporation (IEC), another Hong Kong based group, in good faith but that the COVID-19 crisis had ‘fundamentally undermined’ his ability to fund the club.
Parry, though, rubbished those claims.
“It frankly made no sense, and it still makes no sense. It just doesn’t stack up. We are launching our own investigation to find out exactly what has gone on. Clearly that is not being helped by them not being here, they’re a long way away. Which of course raises the question of foreign and absentee owners. We are obviously communicating on a regular basis with the administrators, who have access to far more information than we have.”
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