Warriors’ plight shows rugby finances on brink
It’s no secret that Worcester Warriors are up for sale – sorry, ‘seeking further investment’ – but things took a curious turn last week.
Edward Griffiths, late of Saracens, went onto the unofficial Warriors website, offering to answer supporters’ questions regarding his desire to buy the club. There were plenty of questions from fans, and he was as good as his word – his lengthy response means that noone is in the dark about what he wants to happen.
The first thing to say is that what he gave us was his side of the story, and we haven’t really heard what the club’s owners, Jersey-based Sixways Holdings have to say about it. The major shareholder in the Warriors is Greg Allen, and Griffiths says that he was close to agreeing a deal to buy the club, but it foundered on Allen’s reluctance to sell the freehold of the Sixways site. Griffiths says that he and his undisclosed backers then walked away, and that Allen told them that he had ‘decided to move forward in a different direction’.
All we really know is that the club was on the market, and presumably is if the right bid comes in, Griffiths wants to buy it, and that the Warriors are in their traditional place at the bottom of the table, with just one losing bonus point to show for six Premiership games.
At the risk of infuriating loyal Worcester fans, I don’t think they’ve ever really been a Premiershiplevel club. Yes, this is their twelfth season in the top flight, but since they arrived in 2004-05 they’ve never made it to the top half of the table, and in the last eleven seasons have been relegated twice, and have never finished higher than tenth. The reality is that they’re better than a Championship club, but not really enough to make their mark at the top table. Some distinguished head coaches have tried, but ultimately failed, to make the Warriors a top six side – if the likes of the late John Brain, Mike Ruddock, Richard Hill, and Dean Ryan all couldn’t do it, you wonder who will, and now current director of rugby Gary Gold has announced he’s off to coach the USA at the end of the season.
That Edward Griffiths has the best of intentions for the Warriors isn’t in doubt. He was appointed as a consultant back in January to help review their rugby operations, and stayed until September when he resigned, citing a conflict of interstill est, inasmuch as he wanted to buy the current owners out. In his time at the Warriors he clearly saw something that made him believe there is untapped potential at the club. We don’t know anything about who Griffiths’ financial backers are, although his comments have led to inevitable speculation that they might be South African, or that there might be a Japanese involvement.
Griffiths is something of a Marmite figure in English rugby – his success in taking Saracens from a mid-table club to the heights of the European game can’t be denied, but other aspects of his tenure there divide opinion. It’s widely believed that Sargood ries were one of the clubs which were found not to have ‘broken’ the salary cap, but which made a commercial settlement with Premiership Rugby in what was far from the ruling body’s finest hour.
Similarly, many fear that the losses made by Saracens – and others – cast a shadow over the Premiership, and worry that this is a financial bubble that could burst, with catastrophic consequences for the English game.
Who knows how this will end, but the suspicion is that it won’t be a long drawn-out saga – the owners have said they will continue to support the club until new investment is found, but it’s also clear they’d like that to be soon.
The wider message is that owners do sometimes want to step aside, but it’s not always simple to find the right exit. To those who have their head in the sand, and think that things are stable in the Premiership, dream on – there could well be stormy times ahead, and I just don’t think there’s any sort of a plan to cope with a major owner walking away. The English elite game is in denial about its finances, and the Worcester situation shows that it’s time to wake up and smell the coffee!