Busy exit door at the DW
Friday, May 11, 2012 at 2:00 PM | by Daniel Whiteway 
The key element of competitive, league-based football is that, season by season, you build and improve your team and squad and over time, you’ll get better and better and your league position will subsequently improve too as a measure of that improvement.
Sadly, some teams in the contemporary league system have a base upon which to build that would make the foolish man of the parable think “well, they’re pretty much screwed”.
One of those teams is Wigan who’s current state of existence effectively plays out like this; Premier League survival secured very late, perceived best players sold on to bigger clubs, cheaper unknowns bought in as replacements, allow six months for the new team to gel together, Premier League survival secured very late and so on.
Thus, the pattern has been identified and a story in the Sun today adds to the probability that it will be continued this summer with the story reporting that Wigan manager Roberto Martinez is resigned to losing Hugo Rodallega, Chris Kirkland, Mohamed Diame and Steve Gohuri as all of their contracts expire next month.
Or is the pattern being continued? These players have played a grand total of 47 games between them this season so they can hardly be classed as Wigan’s best players this season so the pattern doesn’t really apply here.
That said, there is still all of the summer months yet for clubs to look at the likes of Victor Moses, Maynor Figuerora, Ali Al-Habsi and the like and think “Yeah, we’ll have them; why the hell not.”
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