Plymouth ready for double celebration
PLYMOUTH ALBION have big plans to become a sustainable Championship club playing in front of sell-out 5,000 crowds in the next four years.
The goal is part of their ‘Project 150’ initiative which aims to mark the club’s 150th anniversary in 2026 by not only celebrating its history but also building a brighter future on and off the field.
One of the aims is to honour former player Jimmy Peters’ memory with a statue at Brickfields. Peters was the first black man to play rugby union for England and the only black England player until 1988.
Project 150 intends to draw on the support of the local community and businesses, as well as strengthening links with the Armed Forces and the Ocean City’s universities, to become a true ‘Heritage Club’, which encompasses rugby for all.
It is the brainchild of Albion commercial director, Chris Bentley, who saw at first-hand how Exeter became not only the dominant team in the county but in Europe, initially in his role as player and then for six years in corporate sales.
Ambition needs to be matched by finance and since its launch earlier this year, Albion have partnered up with Princess Yachts, the UK’s largest yacht manufacturer, in a five-figure deal, while engineering services provider, Babcock International, are well down the road to coming on board.
Still, there is a long way to go before Albion reach their target of just shy of £1million in commercial revenue by 2026.
“My history is Exeter Chiefs and I was sourcing 10 times the money we need to get commercially at Plymouth Albion,” said Bentley, a can-do individual with a wealth of experience in rugby.
“Plymouth as a city is a third bigger than Exeter with a lot of heavy industry and I am already working with those businesses and saying ‘c’mon, get involved’.
“We don’t want to be owned by a sugar daddy, we don’t want a mega business coming in, we want all the businesses to chuck in a bit. If you’re going to take out a hospitality table, come and do it at Plymouth Albion; if you have got a bit of money that you are going to pay the tax man, you might as well offset it by taking out an advertising board.”
Former lock Bentley has personally experienced the rough and the smooth of professional club rugby, losing his job at Orrell and then enjoying much better times at the Chiefs, so his conviction that Albion can become Championship flagbearers has to be respected.
While Albion’s plans may seem fanciful at first, it was only back in 2004/2005 that they were long-time challengers for the National One (now
Championship) title, attracting an average 3,500 gate, dwarfing that of Exeter.
“I was at Exeter for 13 years and Plymouth was the better setup. At the time they had the bigger stadium, better support and in all honesty their team was probably better than ours,” he said, frankly. “But Tony Rowe had a business plan that was based on a sustainable model whereas Plymouth was at the whim of a relatively rich benefactor and when he lost interest they started their slide.
“No-one is going to do what Tony Rowe has done,” he added. “He’s been phenomenal and I’ll be taking a hell of a lot of his blueprint.
“When I came down here I told him what I was going to do and he gave me his blessing.
“We are not going to usurp Exeter Chiefs in any way but I think a rugby club in the Championship tier with a sustainable business model, where we are trying to encourage our players to get meaningful employment, could become something of a best-practice model for rugby union outside of the Premiership.”
On the rugby side, Bentley
is confident that Albion’s frontline coaches, Damian Welch and Ryan Lamb, can haul the team up the National 1 table after a challenging bedding-in year.
The ex-Premiership duo have both been retained as well as all of the current squad except for utility back Connor Eastgate who is trying his luck in the Super 6 competition in his native Scotland.
On top of that, Albion have brought in seven new players, including Navy powerhouse Scott Makepeace, and expect a couple of loanees from Exeter and Pirates through the season.