Tarnished titles should be stripped from Saracens
Disgraced club must not just be penalised but have all their ill-gotten honours formally disowned
It is almost endearing, this insistence by Saracens that their demotion and disgrace stem from nothing more than clerical oversight. The full details of the disciplinary report that triggered their relegation from the Premiership highlight how their methods of subverting the salary cap were, to say the least, exotic. An interestfree loan to help the Vunipola brothers buy a property, lump-sum payments to Maro Itoje from a hospitality company: these are not the actions of a club who had just forgotten how to use a calculator.
Let us spell out Saracens’ behaviour for what it is. For three consecutive seasons, they cheated their way to glory, and could offer no means of proving that they were not doing so again. They have expressed contrition only to their own fans, not to the clubs left in the shadow of their ill-gotten success. And their commitment to transparency is such that when Edward Griffiths, their chief executive, was approached for comment by the BBC outside Allianz Park, he spread his hand over the camera lens, like a fugitive salesman on Rogue Traders.
Somehow, in the face of Saracens’ recklessness, there are still those who feel they have been hard done by. There are claims that the treatment has been “vindictive”, as one defender of the club put it, and disproportionate. After all, or so this curious logic goes, they only breached the cap for 2017-18 by a meagre £98,000. In such a school of thought, there is no mention that over the previous campaign, they overspent by £1.1million, or in 2018-19 by £906,000. Nor is there allowance for the fact that Saracens accepted relegation to avoid undergoing a full audit of their affairs.
Proportion is all about perspective and, viewed from another angle, there is an argument that Saracens’ sanctions do not go far enough. In other codes, plenty of precedent exists for punishing clubs found guilty of financial irregularities by stripping them of their titles. In 2010, Melbourne Storm conceded that they had committed serious breaches of the salary cap, via a dual contract and book-keeping system, which left National Rugby League in Australia oblivious to £1.8million in outside payments to players. The upshot? The loss of the two Premierships that they had won in 2007 and 2009. With relegation not an option in NRL, the Storm were also compelled to play an entire campaign without the chance to score points.
For now, Saracens hold on to the two domestic crowns they secured during their period of cap-busting, not because their transgressions were of any lesser magnitude than the Storm’s, but because the Premiership lacks the capacity to take them away. It is an impotence that irks Darren Childs, the Premiership’s chief executive, who said this week: “I was surprised we don’t have the power to do that, but we don’t. Looking at the future regulations, it is absolutely top of the agenda.”
It is a wonder that rival clubs, where livelihoods have been damaged by Saracens’ largesse, are