Dave Whelan - An Arseclart

After Phil Brown’s critique of Cesc Fabregas’s match-day wardrobe, another football figure is getting all shirty about a rival’s clobber.

Launching his new chain of fitness clubs this week, Dave Whelan, the Wigan chairman and noted arsehole, denounced the habit of the Newcastle owner (and his bitter business adversary) Mike Ashley of reporting for duty in a bar-code home shirt.

“You just don’t do that sort of thing in football,” Whelan harrumphed, before adding that he could see Newcastle were destined for trouble the moment he spotted the new man’s sartorial arrangements.

“When I first went there after he had just bought it he turned up to the boardroom in jeans, trainers and replica shirt. Immediately he did that, the club’s gone.”

Which, you might think, is a little Gerald Ratner of someone whose fortune was forged from the retail of nylon leisurewear. Ratner once described his own jewellery product as “total crap”.

Now Whelan reckons that sporting stock like that on sale in his JJB stores displays “no class whatsoever”.

By what is surely a coincidence, the Wigan website is currently advertising a clearance sale of 2008-09 home shirts at just £15 apiece. Presumably, even at that price, each comes with a warning not to wear it in the chairman’s presence.

An Arse Yesterday