Dave Whelan

Dave Whelan is an English businessman and former professional footballer, the man who turned a single Wigan fishing tackle shop into the JJB Sports high-street chain and then bought Wigan Athletic and carried the club all the way to the Premier League.

He is 89 now and long retired from the day-to-day running of both businesses, but his name is still all over Wigan: the JJB era made him one of the wealthiest self-made men in the north of England, and his two decades as Latics chairman gave the town top-flight football for the first time in its history. Fans still talk about him the way they talk about a founding father, and the odd phone call from him about a player still makes the local paper, as one did in July 2026 when a Wigan chief recalled him ringing up about Dan Burn.

What sets Whelan apart is that he did it twice, in two completely unrelated worlds, and he did it after a broken leg in an FA Cup final took away the career he had planned on. [edit]

Whelan arrived in the world on 24 November 1936 in Bradford, West Yorkshire, and football found him early. He came through Wigan Boys Club, the kind of local setup where a talented kid got noticed by scouts from the bigger Lancashire clubs, and in December 1953 he signed for Blackburn Rovers. He was 17. First-team football followed quickly enough that he was still a teenager when he was playing senior games.

His career took him to Crewe Alexandra as well, and by the end of the 1950s he had settled into a solid professional life at Blackburn, a club with real history and a proper First Division following. Then came 1960 and the FA Cup final, and a tackle that broke his leg. He was 23. The injury ended his top-level playing career, and the timing could hardly have been worse: he had no trade, no degree, and a family to think about.

What he did next is the part of the story Wigan people tell with real affection. Rather than drift into pub talk and regret, he went into business, and his first venture was about as modest as it gets: a small fishing tackle shop in Wigan. That shop is the seed from which everything else grew. He sold tackle, then sports gear, then more sports gear, and he learned retail the hard way, standing behind a counter and working out what people actually wanted to buy.

By the time the 1970s came around he had a chain taking shape, and the name JJB, taken from his own initials, was starting to appear on shopfronts across the north west. Nothing about the early years suggests a future Premier League owner. It was shopkeeping, done well, in a town that took him to its heart. [edit]

JJB Sports became the story of the 1980s and 1990s high street. Whelan expanded the chain aggressively through the boom years, floated it on the London Stock Exchange, and at its peak JJB had hundreds of stores and a market value in the hundreds of millions. He sold his stake and stepped away, but retail was not finished with him: he later founded the Dave Whelan Sports chain, and in August 2020 Frasers Group, Mike Ashley's outfit, bought that business for £37 million.

The football side is the part that made him a local institution. Whelan bought Wigan Athletic in 1995, when the club was a lower-division outfit playing in front of modest crowds at Springfield Park. He funded the move to the new JJB Stadium, backed a succession of managers, and watched the club climb division by division. In 2005 Wigan reached the Premier League, and they stayed there for eight seasons, a run that included an FA Cup final win in 2013 under Roberto Martinez. For a town of its size, that is extraordinary, and Whelan paid for most of it.

He chaired the club for two decades. In 2015 he handed control to his grandson David Sharpe, who later sold Wigan to International Entertainment Corporation. Whelan's later years in the public eye were not always comfortable: on 31 December 2014 the FA banned him for six weeks over comments he made in a Guardian interview, a sanction he accepted. Even so, his standing at Wigan never really slipped, and in March 2026 both the Mirror and the Manchester Evening News ran stories about the time he agreed to buy Manchester United before his wife stepped in and stopped the deal. [edit]

Whelan's public image is built on bluntness. He is a straight-talking Lancashire businessman of the old school, the sort who says what he thinks and then deals with the consequences, as he did when the FA banned him in 2014. In Wigan he is treated with genuine warmth, a benefactor rather than a distant owner. In the national press he has often been cast as the self-made retail magnate who bought a football club and actually delivered, a rare thing. He is not a polished media figure and has never tried to be. [edit]

iFANN has not yet collected fame data for Dave Whelan, so there is no published ranking to point to as of the October 2026 data month. He is not on the September 2026 iFAMOUS Rankings flagship list either. Within football, though, his fame is real and local: he is a Wigan institution, the man who bankrolled the club's rise and whose name still comes up whenever the Latics are discussed.

The fanbase around him is not a formal fandom with a name. It is Wigan Athletic's support, the people who stood on the terraces at Springfield Park and then filled the JJB Stadium, and they treat Whelan as the reason any of it happened. The stories they pass around are the ones in this page: the tackle at Wembley, the tackle shop, the phone call about Dan Burn, the near-miss on Manchester United. There are no organised campaigns, no fan projects in his name, just a town that remembers who paid the bills. [edit]

Whelan's initials are where the JJB name comes from: John Joseph? No, David John Whelan, but the brand that became a household sight on British high streets took its letters from his own name.

He is famously a Wigan man through and through despite being born in Bradford, and the town's supporters treat him as one of their own.

The Manchester United story is the one fans still retell: Whelan, by then a very rich man, was apparently ready to buy the club before his wife put her foot down and the deal collapsed. He has been described in the press as once being richer than David Beckham.

He played in an FA Cup final at 23 and broke his leg in it, which means his entire business empire traces back to one bad tackle at Wembley.

His grandson David Sharpe was running Wigan Athletic in his twenties, one of the youngest chairmen in the English game. [edit]

Whelan married his wife and the couple have a daughter. The family has stayed close to the Wigan project: his grandson David Sharpe took over as chairman in 2015 and later oversaw the sale of the club to International Entertainment Corporation. Whelan's wife is the person credited in press accounts with talking him out of a move for Manchester United, which tells you something about the household dynamic. He has lived in the Wigan area for most of his adult life and remains a familiar local figure. [edit]

Wigan Athletic, Blackburn Rovers, Crewe Alexandra, JJB Sports, Dave Whelan Sports, Frasers Group. [edit]

Whelan has kept his private life out of the papers, and there is no documented public dating history beyond his marriage. He married his wife, whose name is not widely published, and the couple have a daughter. His wife is the figure credited in press accounts with stopping his attempt to buy Manchester United, which is about as much as the public record reveals about her. As of 2026, Whelan is married to her and the couple remain together. [edit]

Dave Whelan's fortune comes from three places: the JJB Sports years, the sale of the Dave Whelan Sports chain, and two decades of owning Wigan Athletic. JJB made him genuinely rich in the 1990s, when the chain was one of the biggest sportswear retailers in Britain and its shares were flying. The later business, Dave Whelan Sports, was sold to Mike Ashley's Frasers Group in August 2020 for £37 million, a clean cash exit at the end of his retail career.

The football club was never a money-maker in the conventional sense. Whelan put money into Wigan rather than taking it out, funding the stadium move and the push to the Premier League, and the club's later sale to International Entertainment Corporation was handled by his grandson. Property and investments round out the picture. The iFANN Editorial Team's reading of his earnings, business sales and assets puts his fortune at approximately $265 million as of 2026, built almost entirely from scratch after a broken leg ended his playing days at 23. [edit]