Wigan

Wigan is a mill and mining town between Manchester and Liverpool, better known for its rugby league side than its footballers for most of the twentieth century — the joke about "Wigan Pier" outlasted several attempts to give the town a football club worth following. Athletic was the fifth try, formed in 1932 after Wigan Borough folded the previous year, and it took the best part of six decades before the club had much to show for the persistence.

The turn came with Dave Whelan, a local businessman who bought the club in 1995 and financed the move from the old Springfield Park to a new stadium, opened in 1999 and known for years as the DW Stadium before it became The Brick Community Stadium in 2024. Whelan also backed a Spanish signing policy that nobody expected from a lower-league club in the north-west: Roberto Martínez arrived in 1997 alongside Isidro Díaz and Jesús Seba, nicknamed the Three Amigos, the first Spanish players the club had fielded. Martínez played more than 200 games across two spells, then returned as manager in 2009.

What he did with the job justified the gamble. Wigan reached the Premier League and stayed in England's top flight before Martínez took them to the 2013 FA Cup final against Manchester City, a game they were expected to lose. Ben Watson scored the only goal, and the club that had needed five attempts to establish itself had won the FA Cup less than fifteen years after leaving Springfield Park. Martínez left for Everton soon after; so, eventually, did James McCarthy, an academy product who made over 120 appearances in midfield before the same move.

Wigan have never won anything bigger than that Cup. Four League One titles and an EFL Trophy pair sit either side of it, but the club has bounced between divisions since relegation from the Premier League followed the 2013 final by only days, and a first Championship title, from 2002–03, remains its only spell of sustained top-half stability outside that Cup-winning season.