WIGAN ATHLETIC have been deducted 12 points and face a battle to avoid relegation after the administrators were called in.
The Championship club have been the in-form team this year but financial problems behind the scenes have dramatically surfaced.
The club’s Hong Kong-based owners tried to bring in new backers to prop up the club, but instead they have had to seek administration to pay their bills.
Their problems were made all the more severe with coronavirus seeing English football suspended.
The club, who won the FA Cup in 2013, will be deducted 12 points as a result of the move, but this will not be applied until the end of the Championship season.
If they are relegated, the sanction would be applied to the start of their League One campaign in 2020-21.
But if their results on the pitch are good enough to stay up, it will be applied to the final 2019-20 table instead.
The club are currently in 14th on 50 points, and a 12-point drop would take them bottom and four points adrift of safety.
Wigan hoped to sell left back Antonee Robinson to AC Milan in January to balance the books, but that collapsed over a medical problem.
Ironically Robinson has returned after it was discovered he did not need surgery on an irregular heart rhythm.
Latics also signed up their loan and out of contract players on longer deals just a few days ago before the bombshell news.
A statement said Paul Stanley, Gerald Krasner and Dean Watson from Begbies Traynor had been appointed as joint administrators of the club on Wednesday.
Krasner said: “Our immediate objectives are to ensure the club completes all its fixtures this season and to urgently find interested parties to save Wigan Athletic FC and the jobs of the people who work for the club.
“Obviously the suspension of the Championship season due to Covid-19 has had a significant impact on the recent fortunes of the club.
“Wigan Athletic has been a focal point and source of pride for the town since 1932 and anyone who is interested in buying this historic sporting institution should contact the joint administrators directly.”
The Latics are 14th in the Championship with six games left to play. The second tier season restarted on June 20.
The club were in the Premier League as recently as 2013, winning the FA Cup in the same year.
Wigan dropped down into League One in 2015 but made an immediate return to the Championship.
The club recorded a net loss of £9.2m in their most recent annual accounts for the year ending June 30, 2019.
That was an increase of £1.5m on the previous year.
