Wigan Athletic are holding their annual end-of-season presentation evening on Wednesday, and built into it is an appreciation of everything the former chairman Dave Whelan has put into the club. The timing could certainly have been better, with Rotherham condemning Wigan to a second relegation in three seasons 24 hours earlier, but if the Latics have learned anything in the two years since defeating Manchester City to lift the FA Cup it is that time quickly runs out for a team on the slide.

Famously, Wigan were relegated from the Premier League within days of their Wembley success. The club’s finest hour and most damaging league setback – a not entirely unexpected defeat at Arsenal in a must win game – came in the space of a week. No one at or around Wigan anticipated this happening two years later, though for various reasons perhaps the seriousness of the first relegation was overlooked at the time.

The sheer euphoria of winning the FA Cup was one insulation against reality. Some fairly big clubs such as Leicester, Middlesbrough and Crystal Palace have never done that, and for a small town side to come up through the divisions and write their name in the history books in such style was considered a fair swap by many supporters. Wigan had been clinging to Premier League existence in the last few seasons of their eight-year run in the top flight in any case. In 2013 it simply appeared the club bowed to the inevitable but took the FA Cup as a bonus. A team that could outplay Manchester City at Wembley would surely have little problem getting back out of the Championship, and even though Roberto Martínez would leave for Everton, the size and quality of the squad ought to put Wigan securely among the promotion hopefuls, whoever the new manager turned out to be.

Supporters, and perhaps even players, began to look at the Championship as a brief respite from the unforgiving Premier League, a chance to visit old stamping grounds and renew acquaintance with a few old friends, playing at a lower level but winning a few more matches before using all the recently accrued experience to escape at the first or second opportunity.

That is almost exactly how Wigan’s short sojourn in the Championship turned out, except that it was never an enjoyable experience and the escape was through the floor rather than the roof. Whelan interviewed Steve McClaren for the manager’s job but plumped for Owen Coyle, possibly underestimating how abruptly different the former Bolton manager’s preferred playing style was to that of the outgoing Martínez. It was a marriage that never seemed to be entirely happy, and the complications of playing in the Europa League – Wigan’s “prize” for FA Cup success – only added to the strain. New players had to be brought in to bulk out the squad, disappointing results and long trips in Europe took their toll in the league. When Uwe Rösler was brought in before Christmas after Coyle’s side had stumbled to four successive defeats, he managed an impressive turnaround that took the club into the play-offs as well as the FA Cup semi-finals, only for a 60-game season to catch up with the players at the end.

Wigan lost on penalties to Arsenal at Wembley and were beaten over two play-off legs by Queens Park Rangers.

Rösler still appeared to be a capable manager, yet results failed to materialise in his second season and players he brought in could not gel.

Amid reports of a confrontational style and disaffected players Wigan made another sacking mid-campaign. “Uwe is a good guy but we can’t be in the bottom three,” Whelan said, reasonably enough, for that was how far the club had fallen by November. However Whelan’s solution for getting the club out of the bottom three, with most of the season then remaining, is likely to be remembered as his worst judgment call. Even as he ushered Malky Mackay into the vacant managerial seat the Wigan chairman talked himself into trouble with ill-advised and unnecessary comments about racial minorities, and what was always going to be a controversial appointment in the light of Mackay’s indiscretions at Cardiff and an ongoing FA investigation descended into pure farce.

Whether Mackay is a better manager than his time at Wigan suggests will only be known when – or if – he joins his next club. What seemed a promising track record at Cardiff never materialised in Lancashire, with Wigan failing to win a single home match until April, by which time relegation was all but certain and Mackay was out of the club.

Gary Caldwell is in charge now, and if Wigan were secretly hoping the former player would immediately win over the dressing room and produce a flurry of points in the final five matches, it did not quite work out that way. Caldwell did more than Mackay and supervised a solitary home win, but so far it is his only win and it was never going to be enough. It is fair to say opinion in Wigan is divided over the latest managerial appointment, this time ostensibly made not by Whelan, who stepped down after his FA charge, but by his 23-year-old grandson David Sharpe who was named as his successor.

“Everyone can see that in the last four games the club has got its identity back,” the youngest chairman in the league told supporters this week. “We have a fantastic manager in the making, we can use relegation as a springboard to come back stronger. Nothing else but an immediate return to the Championship will suffice.”

A letter from a season-ticket holder to the local paper, however, sums up the situation slightly differently. “Blind optimism has led the club to a fate it fully deserves,” it says. “Whelan’s questionable decision making has tarnished the club’s image and his own, and now he appears to have thrown in the towel. We have a young chairman wearing very large L plates who has appointed a manager with extremely limited senior coaching experience to preside over what is now a very poor squad. I confidently predict that Latics’ stay in League One will be as short as their stay in the Championship.”

Many would argue that League One is about Wigan’s level and the last dozen or so years have been the aberration, brought about through astute stewardship – Paul Jewell, Steve Bruce, Martínez – and Whelan’s financial backing. It is not clear how much of any of that remains, but the harsh lesson is that recruitment and planning for the future is so much easier when you are at a high level and people want to join you. Wigan have now lost any special status they used to have as a plucky little club punching above their weight. It is as if their DNA has been wiped – there is almost no relation to the side that reached its zenith two years ago. They are just a little club again, and it will be a hard road back. Especially if they keep insisting this time, as they did two years ago, that they can return in a single season.