Dave Whelan: Whelan's millions have set Wigan buzzing

Local hero who built sports and business empires looks forward to Grand Final - and perhaps the Premiership

For Dave "Mr Wigan" Whelan, this could be the day of days. While Wigan Warriors, the rugby league club he owns, contest the Super League Grand Final against Bradford Bulls, Wigan Athletic, his football club, play Gillingham at home needing a win or conceivably just a draw (depending on how Sheffield United fare at Millwall) to return to the top of the First Division. If both results go Wigan's way, and assuming a profitable afternoon in his 456 JJB Sports shops, then Whelan will only need Poole's Pies (proprietor: D Whelan) to sell more sausage rolls than usual for his day to be a happy one indeed.

We meet in his office at the headquarters of the JJB Sports empire. It is, you will not be shocked to learn, in Wigan. Whelan is white-haired, rosy-cheeked and rather benevolent-looking, although looks, as some JJB employees will tell you, can be deceptive. He grew up scarcely a mile away, at 70 Chadwick Street, long since demolished. It was a two-up, two-down terraced house, with a toilet 100 yards away shared with three other houses.

Not least of his childhood ambitions was to have a toilet indoors. "Bloody hell," he says. "That was living." From that, to this, has taken him 65 years. But sport always loomed large.

He captained Wigan boys at both rugby league and football, and later joined Blackburn Rovers as a full-back most politely described, from what I can gather, as "uncompromising". In business, too, that's the politest way of putting it. Even he is less polite. "I'm a tough bugger to work for," he says. He might have Park Lane-style riches, incidentally, but his vowels still smack of 70 Chadwick Street.

It is the fortunes of Wigan Athletic which preoccupy him, ahead of those of Wigan Warriors, but Whelan recognises that this places him in a minority of Wiganers. "Football is coming up big-style," he says, "but rugby league has always been king in this town and it still is." As if to underline this, the attendance against Stoke City on Tuesday was a relatively paltry 7,678.

"So to get to the Grand Final," he continues, "that's absolutely fantastic for this town because they're our own lads. Most of the rugby league lads are youngsters from Wigan, and when they put the cherry-and-white on they're proud, and it shows. They've done brilliantly when you think that half the team's under 20. We've lads of 17 in the team and that's a man's league, I'll tell you."

It will be an achievement of similar brilliance if Wigan Athletic stay in the First Division's top six, and downright awesome if they win promotion to the Premiership. Last season, after all, they were in the Second Division, and indeed were routinely cited, before this season began, in journalistic accounts of the decline and fall of West Ham United. From playing in front of 60,000 at Old Trafford, West Ham must now contemplate wet Tuesday nights in Wigan... that sort of thing. "We'll bloody show them wet Tuesday nights in Wigan," was the response from deepest Lancashire, and they bloody have.

So, the $64,000 question: can Wigan achieve Premiership status? "We want to achieve it, though whether we're ready for it is another matter," Whelan says. "If we do get there we can compete with the likes of Bolton, Southampton, Charlton. What we cannot do is compete with Man U, Arsenal and now Chelsea. I don't include Liverpool, by the way. Unless they make some changes, I think they're going to fall into mediocrity. But don't get me wrong, I want them to win because they're a Lancastrian side [Whelan doesn't hold with any 'Merseyside' nonsense]. I always want the northerners to beat the arse off the southerners.

"The thing with the Premier [League] is that the ambition of most clubs going up is just to stay there. I wouldn't want that. You have to have higher aims, maybe to finish in the top 10. You can't expect to win it, although you should expect to win it. Every supporter of every club should have in his mind: we can win this thing.

"But at the moment there are only three teams who can win it, and I don't think that's true competition. What we need are salary limits. I don't mean a salary cap, which they've just introduced in the Third Division. Salary capping means that you can spend 50 or 60 per cent of your income, but how do you audit that? It's very hard. Rugby league has a salary limit. Clubs are allowed to spend up to £1.6m on salaries, and every month the [Inland] Revenue check it.

"In the Premier, they should set a £25m limit so that every club has the same opportunity to win that bloody league. The Premier will say 'no way' but they shouldn't. Not unless they want three teams winning everything.

"Wigan rugby league club won the Challenge Cup eight years in a row, and won the championship in six of those eight years. It's not right. The game goes sour. People think, 'Oh shit, Wigan again'. And when they were going for a ninth Challenge Cup and Salford beat them, it was one of the best things that could have happened for the game." It was also, it has to be said, one of the best things that could have happened for Whelan, as the club then plunged into financial disarray, making them ripe for takeover. Still, there is much sense in what he says, and the trappings of his business success lend further credibility. But I can think of a businessman with even bigger, shinier trappings who would lead the resistance to a football salary limit: a Mr R Abramovich.

On the other hand, Mr Wigan and Mr Chelski have certain things in common. For one thing, both bought a club previously owned by Mr Ken Bates. And for another, both are traditional football benefactors, for whom the financial rewards of owning a football club do not remotely justify the expenditure.

"There are only two clubs making a profit in the whole of the bloody football league, Manchester United and maybe Arsenal," says Whelan. "You don't get involved in this if you want to make money. But when I die I'm going to pay a hell of a lot of bloody tax, and I'd sooner give it to a football club than the government. I've put something of the order of 60 million quid into both clubs and the [JJB] stadium.

"Of course, you have to make sure how much you can afford without your family going short. I can only spend 200 or 300 quid a week on myself. I'm not a fancy eater or anything of that nature. Then you see how much cash flow you have, what it's going to cost, what you're going to do ... but it's very easy for ambition to get the better of you. Wigan rugby league club is the most famous in the world; Wigan Athletic is not one of the most famous clubs in football. The first crowd when I took over was 1,650. So we have the hardest path yet to tread. The next steps are the great ones."

In taking those steps, he is following in the path of one of his "all-time heroes", the late Jack Walker, whose wealth catapulted Blackburn Rovers back into the big time. Whelan broke his leg badly while playing for Rovers in the 1960 FA Cup Final and was unable to play again for two years, during which time Walker - who was then merely a fan - used to slip him a fiver every couple of weeks.

Walker remains an inspiration, as much for picking the right manager - Kenny Dalglish - as for the way he bankrolled his home-town team. In the former Bradford City manager Paul Jewell, Whelan is sure that he, too, has the right man. "He believes what I do, does Paul, that you don't get anything without hard work. He'd been out of the game for six months before he came here, but he's everything I expected him to be, hard-working and clear-minded. And he spends my money very carefully, like it's his own. I like his style. Everything he does suits me perfectly."

Whelan speaks his mind, whether in praise or criticism. Perhaps it's something to do with growing up with one outside toilet shared by four families that teaches a man to get directly to the point. And speaking of his childhood, I wonder who his early sporting heroes were? "Stan Matthews, Tom Finney and Nat Lofthouse, and I played against all three of them. When I was 10 or 11, that was when Stan was at his best, and when I was 18, I marked him. Got nowhere near him, though. You couldn't get near him or Tom Finney."

What, then, from a man who was there, of the debate that has been raging on and off for more than 50 years? Who was better, Matthews or Finney? "As an outside-right, Stan. But if you didn't give him the ball to his feet he wouldn't graft for it. As a footballer, Tom Finney. He grafted, and he could play anywhere. But the game's much better now, you know. There's so much more freedom of expression. As a full-back, I wasn't allowed into the opposition half. If I went 10 yards into their half, the manager would do his nut. He'd shout, 'Get back, it's not your bloody job'."

In 1954 Whelan was a 16-year-old apprentice mining engineer, who had had trials for Wolves, Burnley and Newcastle as well as Blackburn, when the Blackburn manager arrived at 70 Chadwick Street. He was Johnny Carey, the legendary former captain of Manchester United and the Republic of Ireland.

"It blew my dad's brains to see John Carey in our house. That's why I signed, because he came to the house. It makes a difference even now, when the manager knocks on the door." He signed on his 17th birthday, but was forced by his mother to stay part-time, and continue learning a trade. Then Carey called again one evening.

"I'll never forget. I was a big-hammer fitter by then, and when I got home from work there was a car outside the house, which was a big thing, there weren't many cars around then. I went in and John Carey was sat there talking to my mother. He said, 'Hello David, you're playing in the first team tomorrow night at Ewood, against West Ham'.

"I went to the ground with my dad, by train and bus. Nobody recognised me, of course, so I heard fellas on the way to the match saying, 'They've got a youngster in tonight. He'll clog 'em, this lad, he's from Wigan'. I was very nervous. I remember saying to the trainer - who was Jack Weddle who'd played centre-forward for Rovers in the 1928 FA Cup Final - that I couldn't find my [shin] pads. He said, 'You've got 'em on, you daft bugger'."

Whelan chuckles at the recollection, and similarly at the recollection of his early, stumbling steps in the sports shop business. After breaking his leg at Wembley he joined Crewe Alexandra, but injury eventually forced his retirement and he opened a stall on Wigan market, selling toiletries. His success there funded his £22,000 purchase, in 1978, of a local sports shop, JJ Bradburn.

"There was a fridge downstairs in that shop and I thought, 'I'm not paying the electricity for that', so I turned it off. But part of the stock was maggots because they used to sell fishing tackle, and we opened the fridge on the Monday morning and a thousand bloody bluebottles flew out. I knocked fishing straight on the head. I thought, 'I'm not having stock that flies away'." I laugh, respectfully. JJB Sports now turns over a billion pounds a year.

And the buzz in Wigan today is nothing to do with bluebottles.

Dave Whelan the life and times

Born: 24 November 1936 in Bradford.

December 1953: Signed for Blackburn Rovers from Wigan Boys Club.

1956: Made debut for Rovers against West Ham at Ewood Park.

1956-58: Two years of National Service prevent him from making his mark in the first team.

7 May 1960: Played in FA Cup Final with Blackburn but a tackle from Norman Deeley, Wolves' outside-right, met Whelan's left shin with an audible crack and, at 23, Whelan's top-level career was effectively over.

1961: Played again but cracked his leg in the same spot against Sheffield Wednesday.

1963-66: Played 115 times for Crewe Alexandra.

1966: With the £400 of compensation he received following his injury Whelan set up a toiletries stall in Wigan market.

1978: Whelan's Discount Stores was sold to the supermarket chain Morrisons for £1.5m. Whelan bought JJB and transformed it from a small sports company specialising in fishing maggots.

1995: Became chairman of Wigan.

1997: Wigan promoted to Second Division as champions.

1998: JJB became the biggest sports retailer in the country, having acquired Sports Division.

2003: Wigan promoted to First Division as champions.

October 2003: Wigan rise to third in First Division.

He says: "Our aim has been and will always be the Premiership. If we don't have that ambition, what is the point of playing football?"

They say: "At Wigan the situation was very promising - the chairman, Dave Whelan, who owns JJB Sports, is a multimillionaire and there are probably more funds available there than at any other club outside the Premiership. Mark my words, Wigan will move upwards and be knocking on the Premiership door very soon." John Deehan, assistant manager