The story of how Dave Whelan made a fortune started with a sickening injury while playing for Blackburn Rovers against Wolverhampton Wanderers in the 1960 FA Cup final.
Before footballers made enough to finish their playing days with a life of leisure stretched out before them – a bit of punditry, possibly, and long hours on the golf course – the prospects were not dissimilar from those facing any other man whose working life had been one of physical labour: a prolonged struggle to make ends meet into old age.
Of those I interview, Whelan stands out as the towering exception. Even by the time he had stopped playing he was already on the way to his first self-made million. The starting point was the moment his leg was shattered playing for Blackburn in the 1960 FA Cup final.
‘After I was in hospital and came back home, I asked the doctor how long I would be in plaster,’ he says. ‘He told me it depended on how quickly the leg took to heal, but that I was bound to be in it for six months, minimum. I was actually in it for nine months.
‘In that time I was bored, I couldn’t do anything. So I went to the market in the centre of Blackburn. I took a look around, saw these two lads who were working on a market stall selling basic toiletries and, knowing I’d got to do something and learn something, I asked if I could work on their stall.’
The Howarth brothers ran the stall and Bill Howarth, the boss, recognised the benefit of having a Blackburn Rovers player, who had appeared in the Cup Final, at his side. He paid Whelan ten shillings a day to serve the customers, who, just as Howarth had reckoned they would be, were attracted by his celebrity assistant.
‘All the people in Blackburn knew me,’ Whelan says, ‘and would stop to buy something so they could ask how I was and whether I was getting better.
‘For my part I learnt so much in six months on that stall.’
The key lesson was the paramountcy of the 16 per cent gross margin, or, as he also puts it, ‘tuppence in every shilling’.
‘I picked it up so quickly,’ he says. ‘If something cost you one and eleven [one shilling and eleven pence] you sold it for two and three – fourpence profit, 16 per cent.’
Clearly Whelan had happened upon something that deeply interested him. ‘I came to look at Wigan where I found they had no outside market. There were none of the stalls they used to make out of metal and then cover in tarpaulin. They were all inside stalls.’
The market superintendent told Whelan there was nothing to stop him having an outside stall. And so, for a rent of 15 shillings a day, he set up two of them by the main entrance.
‘I was selling toiletries – I bought them off the lads in Blackburn, they supplied me – and the first day I took 200 quid. So I’d made like 32 quid in a day.’
Whelan had hoped to resume his playing career with Blackburn but after a couple of comeback games in the reserves he cracked his leg again. In 1962 he was transferred to Crewe Alexandra, stalwarts of the Fourth Division, although in 1963 they gained promotion for the first time in their history.
‘The leg got stronger,’ he says, ‘but the pace never came back.’ He quit playing professional football in 1966, just short of his thirtieth birthday.
By then his life was already set on an entirely different trajectory. ‘The last two years while I was at Crewe I had the market stall in Wigan. I trained in the mornings and my sister ran the stall for me until I got back at one o’clock.
‘Then when I retired from Crewe I knew what I wanted to do and I went to America to learn. I was aware from what I’d read that they were five to six years ahead of us in the retail section.
‘I went to New York, I went to Chicago and looked at what they were doing – and they had just started supermarkets, selling food in one area and non-foods in another. They piled goods up and you helped yourself.
‘It made you wonder, “How do they help themselves to things? They must steal them.” We were used to going into a shop in the UK and saying, “Can I have that?” Someone would then get it for you.
‘But in America it was self-service. Goods were piled up on a pallet and people came in, took two tins of beans, put them in a basket and then paid for what they’d got at the end. It was so different from what we were doing here.’
Whelan came back to Wigan determined to copy the retail model he had observed in the US. ‘I was still working in the market then and earning good, good money – four, five-hundred pounds a week. But straightaway I went to look at this building in Wigan and I thought, “Supermarket – Whelan’s Discount Store”.’
The thought became a reality and, Whelan says, ‘was a fantastic success. You had to queue to get in. In two years I’d opened a total of ten. We were the first supermarkets in the land to sell food and, on the next floor, non-foods – toys, furniture, electrical stuff… the items you could sell were being relaxed all the time.’
This is an edited extract from When Footballers Were Skint by Jon Henderson / @hendojon published by Biteback.