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21st Nov 2014

Wigan owner Dave Whelan apologises for highly insensitive ‘anti-Semitic’ comments

To the surprise of many, he didn’t feel the need to borrow Father Ted’s ‘not a racist’ slideshow while doing so.

Conor Heneghan

To the surprise of many, he didn’t feel the need to borrow Father Ted’s ‘not a racist’ slideshow while doing so.

As you probably know by now, Dave Whelan gave an interview to David Conn of The Guardian yesterday and while attempting to defend his appointment of Malky Mackay (who is the subject of an investigation for alleged racist text messages he had sent while manager of Cardiff City) as Wigan manager, he managed to offend quite a lot of people with his comments.

Jewish and Chinese people in particular had reasons to be offended by what Whelan had to say and in an interview with the BBC (check it out in full here), Whelan has attempted to defend himself and apologised for any offence he might have caused.

When asked about his comments about Jewish people chasing money, Whelan said: “All I was trying to say is that Jewish people are similar to English people in their desire to work hard and get money.”

Whelan, who said that he thought he was misquoted by Conn in the Guardian interview, added: “If I’m causing offence, please accept my apology because I did not say that and I did not mean to insult any of my Jewish friends of any of the Jewish people because I have no hang ups about people, I just get on with every single person.

“We’ve got to be careful what we say but I always try and say and tell the truth.

“If I have upset one person I apologise.”

Whelan’s apology came after anti-racism organisation Kick it Out questioned if he was “a fit and proper person who should be running a football club”.

In the meantime, we could soon see the rather bizarre situation of Mackay having to defend Whelan for offensive comments he made while attempting to defend Mackay in the first place. Hopefully the appropriate action is taken by authorities and this whole sorry mess is cleaned up in the right way sooner rather than later.

Topics:

Football,Racism