The future seemed bright for the Championship club when they changed Hong Kong-based owners a month ago, but last week’s revelation of their financial predicament has resulted in a 12-point deduction, which has yet to be officially applied.
The administrators have said the club have appealed against their punishment, but if upheld, it could see them relegated.
New owners Next Leader Fund said they invested “more than £40m” into the club and blamed the coronavirus pandemic for the decision to put it into administration.
In an interview with BBC sports editor Dan Roan, Parry expressed his surprise at what has happened at the Latics.
The former Liverpool and Premier League chief executive also discussed the English Football League’s owners’ test and said the governing body “will get to the bottom” of why the club is now in this position.
Rick Parry: “It was a tremendous shock – a bolt from the blue.
“Normally if a club is facing administration you get warning signs. Generally they don’t pay HMRC, they don’t pay the players, there are problems with creditors and it happens gradually.
“It is really unprecedented for an owner [Au Yeung Wai Kay, the head of Next Leader Fund that took ownership] 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.”
Roan: Does the EFL need to take some responsibility?
Parry: “He passed the tests. You can criticise them and say they need to be beefed up, but he did pass the test. He wasn’t a complete newcomer because there had been a transition from the previous owner, who had been there two years.
“The previous owner had been putting something like £24m in, and had secured Wigan in the Championship. He introduced the new owner, there had been partnerships, it had evolved. This isn’t somebody who appeared from nowhere.
“Our test, bluntly, is limited, it’s an objective test, there are limited grounds to turn down an owner. It is a test that, by definition, the more foreign owners you have the more difficult it is to apply because of the amount of information that is available.” Read More
