Last Year’s Record: 12 wins, 9 draws, 17 losses for 45 points and 11th place in the Premier league
Transfers (In): Garcia-Penche Jordi Gomez (Espanyol, £1.7m), James McCarthy (Hamilton Academical, £1m), Jason Scotland (Swansea City, £2m), Hendry Thomas (Olimpia, Honduras, undisclosed)
Transfers (Out): Antonio Valencia (Manchester United, £16m), Henri Camara (free), Antoine Sibierski (free), Amr Zaki (end of loan).
Season Outlook:
Wigan’s 2008-2009 11th place finish was their second best finish ever. The close season which followed was probably their busiest ever. First, manager Steve Bruce chose to end his second stint in charge of the Latics to take the job at Sunderland. Close on the heels of that came the sale of Antonio Valencia- far and away their best player- to Manchester United for £16m. Bruce’s replacement, Roberto Martinez (more on him below) and club chairman Dave Whelan used these funds to bring in a good group of players, most notably James McCarthy and Jason Scotland. McCarthy, despite not turning 19 until November, had played almost 100 matches with Hamilton Academical, most of those in the SPL. Scotland, a Trinidad and Tobago international, brings some needed scoring punch to Wigan, having scored 86 goals in 206 matches in Scottish and English football. The remaining new players- Gomez and Thomas- have something to prove, but both are also young and relatively cheap, so the risk to the club is negligible.
Roberto Martinez comes to Wigan from Swansea City where he very quickly established himself as an “up and coming” managerial talent in English football despite leaving the game as a player less than three years ago after a career that included almost 200 matches for Wigan. Martinez, who will be the youngest manager in the Premier League by seven years, was named the League One “Manager of the Year” for the 2007-2008 season after leading Swansea City to the title and its first promotion to the Championship. Martinez followed this up by guiding the team to an 8th place finish in 2008-2009. Once he arrived at Wigan Martinz was quick to bring in two players who had played key roles in his successful stint at Swansea City- Scotland and Gomez. Should Martinez experience anything like the success he had at Swansea, his stay at Wigan is likely to be just as short, as a young, successful manager he will always be able to move up in the world of professional football, English or otherwise.
What will the 2009-2010 EPL season hold for Wigan Athletic? If the experts here at Avoiding the Drop are to be believed, Wigan will finish somewhere between 11th (mid-table) and 18th (relegated). This discrepancy comes down to one factor- depth. Or, more correctly, a lack of depth. If Wigan remains a relatively healthy side during the season they could easily finish in the middle of the table, and perhaps even crack the top ten. If they are hit by injuries- particularly to an important player like Chris Kirkland or Lee Cattermole- they could just as easily find themselves in a relegation dogfight as early the middle of the season. How “shallow” is the team’s depth? If Kirkland goes down, the club’s other goalkeepers are Mike Pollitt- a 37 year old who appeared in one match in 2006, four matches in 2007, and none since then- and Richard Kingson (born in Ghana, now a naturalized Turkish citizen), who has only played 15 matches since leaving the Turkish Super League in 2007. Hardly the kind of situation Wigan want to be in when many other teams in the EPL have another- or possibly two- international players competing for every spot in their starting 11.
