AN hour after axeing Malky Mackay, Wigan’s 23-year-old chairman David Sharpe called his friend, Roberto Martinez.
“I’ve known Roberto since I was little,” explains Sharpe, the grandson of Latics owner Dave Whelan, whose appointment last March was met with almost universal incredulity.
“He was my favourite player when he was here in the 90s. He was so nice to me as a kid and he still sends me birthday presents every year.
“When he was appointed manager, it was like a dream come true for me. I used to go for coffees with him and we’d talk football for hours, sharing ideas about how to take the club forward. He’s probably been my biggest influence, along with Grandad of course.
“Anyway, after I sacked Malky, I met with Roberto the next day. I told him that I was thinking about appointing Gary Caldwell as manager.
“We must have spoken for three hours about whether it was the right thing to do. In the end, he loved it and was convinced it was going to work.”
Everton fans may disagree, but Martinez knows his stuff. Fourteen months after that meeting and 12 since relegation from the Championship, Caldwell’s rebuilt Latics are champions of League One.
And Sharpe, the university drop-out derided as a clueless kid who couldn’t even run a chippy, is the toast of the town. Is it nice to prove the naysayers wrong?
“To be fair, I understand the scepticism,” says Sharpe, who oversaw the signing of 17 new players last summer. “People will naturally think ‘What’s he doing running a football club? He’s 23, he’s out of his depth’. But I always believed I could do the job.
“Why? Because I know this club. Some of the owners today haven’t even been to a game. They buy a club for the glamour and the fame, but they don’t even support them.
“They might have experience of running businesses and making money, but I’ve been in football since the day I was born and Wigan is everything to me. That counts for a lot.”
Speaking to Sharpe, it is clear his love for the club – and desire to succeed – are genuine.
He talks of being wracked with nerves in the royal box as Wigan won the FA Cup in 2013.
“I was sick before the game,” he admits. “I was sitting in the box and kept having to run to the toilet. I just knew how much it meant to my grandad and how unlikely it was that we’d get to the FA Cup final again.”
He talks also of desperately trying to persuade a pig-headed Whelan not to appoint Owen Coyle following Wigan’s relegation from the Premier League a month later.
“I heard from one of Grandad’s friends that he was thinking of appointing Owen,” he recalls. “The alarm bells started ringing because I could see that he and Roberto were two totally different managers.
“They had different philosophies, different characters. But we had the same group of players. To me, we had to appoint someone similar to Roberto, who liked to play football. Owen was a bit more 4-4-2, regimented, get the ball forward quickly.
“I went in and tried to see my grandad to say ‘Don’t do it’ but he didn’t listen. Five months later, Owen was sacked.”
That blunder was the first in a series of gaffes – culminating in the toxic appointment of Mackay, attendant tabloid race storm and impending relegation to League One – that ultimately convinced 79-year-old Whelan to step away from the club he’d run since 1995.
“I’d always wanted to run the club,” says Sharpe. “And Roberto was always begging him to get me involved. But my grandad said ‘No – work in the other businesses, they’re the money-spinners. Why don’t you run the hotels one day?’
“So, I said OK and went off to university, did business and hospitality management. Six months in, I was bored senseless. I wanted to get my hands dirty, so I came home and eventually convinced him to show me the ropes.”
Whelan offered just two words of advice: be ruthless. Sharpe took them to heart. The January before his appointment, he took a hatchet to Wigan’s squad, hacking out every big earner in preparation for League One.
“We had to clear the wage bill early to start the rebuild,” he says. “And the earlier you start the better. Bolton should have done it in January, but they didn’t.
“The likes of Ben Watson, a Wigan legend who scored the FA Cup winner, and Shaun Maloney went. Callum McManaman too. The fans were thinking ‘This lot are just giving up’, but there was a lot of thought behind it. As owner, I can’t do wishful thinking. I have to be pragmatic.”
Next came the dismissal of Mackay. “That wasn’t tough,” he says without emotion. “When you’ve got something in your head and you’re convinced it’s the right thing to do, it’s not a hard conversation.”
Sharpe insists he is no authoritarian. He wants his staff to relax, to enjoy working with him. He sees Caldwell not as an employee but as a partner.
“I talk to him about training, about signings,” he says. “On Tuesday night he was watching Atletico Madrid and he called me to say he’d heard a quote he wanted up at the training ground.
“He’s someone who cares about the club. Managers who don’t look at the finances, who don’t care if the club loses £10m a year, they’re bad managers in my opinion. Gary takes an interest in everything.”
Sharpe has promised prudence next season. “Everybody looks at Bournemouth and says ‘What a great story’, but they lost £40m reaching the Premier League. I’m not going to my grandad, saying ‘Can you write off £40m please?’ We have to be sensible and we have to be clever.”
For now, though, he is just looking forward to today’s coronation.
“It was never about proving people wrong,” he insists. “It was about getting the club back where it should be. But yeah, when I’m standing next to that trophy, maybe people will eat their words a bit.”
