Agree with this. His handling of the sale was utterly catastrophic - taking us from the club's best ever position to non-league while he faffed buyers around and rejected anybody with any promise. He's the reason we got stuck with PW as our only way to avoid going bust.Keith wrote: Sun Apr 12, 2026 3:51 pm Whittingham's leading role in our demise must never be airbrushed out, no matter how crap PW have been.
That said, despite the rubbish situation Whittingham left PW with, I'm getting tired of them bleating about the club's losses and financial issues. They were hanging around (and funding!) the club for a year before the takeover was actually completed. If there's stuff coming out of the woodwork that they apparently weren't aware of - that's 100% on them. And it's not exactly like paying the company that revamped the pitch last summer and paying your training ground supplier are hidden costs. Despite not paying multiple creditors, they've still managed to apparently double the club's monthly losses - which has presumably been wasted on paying managers off and building a ridiculous bloated squad. Simply keeping Derek, and the likely scenario of him recruiting a much tighter squad, would probably have saved hundreds of thousands, plus kept us up.
I don't agree with shouts for starting a phoenix club, and that being preferable. To do so while Morecambe FC still exists would be ridiculous - as pointed out, where would we play? It's a last resort if the club goes bust. But even then, I fear people are underestimating how difficult this would be. Bury have a much bigger and more historic fanbase, plus proximity to Manchester. Macclesfield are historically a more similarly sized club to us, but they've benefitted from some generous investors - arguably aided by their location in Cheshire (plus proximity to Manchester). There's no guarantee we could garner similar support.
I think for the forseeable, we are likely to be stuck with PW. With better decision making, we should be able to absolutely compete at the top end of the NLN without forking out such a crazy amount of money. Do I have hope of better decision making? Ropinder's influence has no doubt been diluted by the recruitment of Jim, Steve and Martin. The more people at the club running things who aren't him, the better. That said, he's still here, and that remains a problem. And in the short term, the outstanding creditors need to be dealt with. No more refusing to pay and going all Trump 'art of the deal' on people. Pay what's owed, get us back to a clean slate. Then if you don't like the arrangements with suppliers, attempt to negotiate new ones, or find different suppliers. And of course, a lot is riding on the footballing restructure and recruitment of a new manager. That should give an indication of how PW's decision making has potentially improved (or not so!).
