It's a very frustrating situation and it's hard to come up with solutions given no one other than Dave Whelan and I.L seem to know the full details of the apparently "favourable" deal that we get. Knowing Dave Whelan though I'd suspect there is only one winner in the deal. I can't ever see Latics getting back into the prem and the way things are going after this season they may not even make it back into the championship and like other's have said that will leave Whelan with no option to try and squeeze more money out of the Rugby. Also, even if Leneghan did want to bank roll our own stadium (which realistically I doubt would be viable) getting planning permission and an ideal location would probably be impossible.

Given the financial difficulty Bolton have been in recently though I do sometimes kind of wish we could tell Whelan to shove it and start to look at potentially playing games at the Macron, Extreme I know and not ideal but I can't think of anything that would wind Whelan up more than us cutting the chord and handing money to their only real rival.

I don't think we have been given all the details of the deal with the stadium company. I think our published turnover is too low for us to be getting 100% of the gate receipts. I suspect the stadium company takes a cut. That said, I don't think it's a bad deal, other than the issues around priority over matches. We get to play in a Premiership standard ground (so we can have 20k+ crowds for our big matches) without a lot of the costs that come with that. Saints fans made a lot of noise over how with their own stadium they would be a richer club than us, but it has proved much harder than they thought to make the stadium pay. As Langtree Park ages (and it doesn't look to me to have been built to anywhere near the quality standards of say the DW or the Macron so I would expect it to age quite quickly compared with the DW or Macron) Saints will have some serious maintenance and refurb costs. The Saints club continues to run at a loss, when you think about how low the SC is this really does show that the ground is seriously detrimental to their financial position. I would not want to be in their position, the club is not financially viable without handouts from the owners at the moment.

Hopefully if Latics are relegated this will prompt a serious discussion with the stadium company. I suspect there is a deal to be done around the RL club paying a higher fixed annual payment and/or a contribution to a better drainage system in return for a better position on fixtures and the ability to keep more of the cash generated if we get bigger crowds or put on events at the DW.

That sounds a feasible way forward to me. IL is no fool; I'm sure he's on the case.

BTW, hadn't spotted you sigs before. You really found some prize quotes there! Hilarious!

Get the naming rights and call the stadium, the Douglas Stadium, so we can be the Riversiders again.

If the Latics get relegated they won't want us generating cash out of the stadium as they'll need all they can get.

Fixtures will be even worse as well as they will enter the FA Cup earlier and will also play in the EFL Trophy.

I think we've just got to let IL sort all this out. He's the businessman AND a massive fan but one who can take the emotion out of this.

It seems that we're getting a prety good deal, but get the hiccup over fixtures once a season. Other than giving other clubs' fans a glimmer of something to try to wind us up its not that much of a ballache tbh