With Saracens in crisis, will Wray optjust to walk away?
European champions’ future looks at stake as owner assesses their devastating punishment
On a freezing November night in 1995, around 350 people crammed into Saracens’ rickety clubhouse at Bramley Road for an extraordinary general meeting.
With professionalism fast approaching, the club had been desperately searching for fresh investment. They had approached the richest man in the world, the Sultan of Brunei, before alighting on a local millionaire, Nigel Wray, who was sponsoring his former team, Old Millhillians. They wrote to him asking whether he would be interested in extending his largesse to them. Wray replied that he would not sponsor them, but he was prepared to buy the club. Saracens’ assets were then valued at less than £100,000, but he was prepared to put in £2million for a 49 per cent stake.
It was this investment that was put to the EGM. Many were suspicious. They loved their ramshackle club and feared change. Still the motion passed. For better and for worse, no rugby club’s history has been so entwined with a single individual as that of Saracens and Wray.
Soon after his takeover, Wray told the press: “In my experience, philanthropic gestures don’t work. There is no bottomless pocket here. We’ve worked out how much was needed, now the club has to generate money itself. Saracens has to become a commercially successful business.” He has since spent at least £50million on the club. Almost prophetically, the
Independent reported soon after the EGM that Wray “would be able to add a further dimension to his input, by finding employment for players in one of his many companies or directing them to one of his business contacts.”
It is such extra-curricular commercial arrangements struck with England players Owen Farrell, Maro Itoje, Richard Wigglesworth,
Billy and Mako Vunipola that have landed Saracens with a 35-point deduction and £5.36million fine. Such a devastating punishment, subject to review, threatens Wray’s whole legacy.
Wray’s main passion has always been sport. In his youth, he played as centre for Old Millhillians and Hampshire. He has spent millions gathering the country’s greatest collection of sporting memorabilia, including the stopwatch used to record Roger Bannister’s fourminute mile. He made his fortune buying a penny-share newsletter, the Fleet Street Letter, which drew 95,000 subscribers at its peak in the 1980s.
In a later newspaper interview, he admitted to investing in the shares that he had tipped, although this was in the days before the Financial Services Act. “I wouldn’t say, hand on heart, I’d be 100 per cent proud of what went on [then],” Wray said. An avowed opponent of government red tape and freemarket supporter, Wray always seems to have maintained a scepticism about rules and regulations. When the salary cap was first introduced in 1999, he had already brought three titans of the game to north London in the form of Francois Pienaar, Michael Lynagh and Philippe Sella.
As he continued his recruitment of superstars through the 2000s, questions soon emerged as to how they all fitted within the cap. Rumours, never proven, have long swirled of payments to offshore accounts and players’ partners being employed on exorbitant salaries. When evidence emerged of Wray’s partnerships with his players in March, Saracens were
confident they would ride out another storm. They insisted that this had all been declared to Andrew Rogers, the Premiership Rugby salary cap manager, while Wray is adamant that coinvestment does not constitute salary. A disciplinary panel chaired by a former Justice of the Supreme Court concluded otherwise.
Their chances of winning their challenge, which is closer to a procedural review than a fresh appeal, are slim. The next stage would be to challenge the validity of the salary cap in the High Court.
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Legal experts also doubt their chances of success here given that Saracens willingly signed up to the salary cap regulations that they would be seeking to overthrow.
So, what comes next? It is instructive to look at the example of the Australian rugby league team Melbourne Storm, who were caught running a shadow payment system in 2010. They were stripped of their 2007 and 2009 NRL titles, fined A$1.6million (£940,000) and made to finish the season on zero points.
Yet when coach Craig Bellamy gave his first press conference after the news broke, the players followed him into the room en masse as a display of unity. Despite having no points to play for, the Storm won four of their next five matches and then finished top of the NRL the following season.
The impact of the scandal also diminished as several other clubs were exposed for salary cap breaches, including the Cronulla Sharks earlier this year. It is easy to envisage the tightknit Saracens squad doing something similar. There is no better fuel than perceived
injustice to make up any points deficit. Wray could also easily absorb the fine from his estimated fortune of £350million.
The far greater, more lasting cost, will be to Saracens’ reputation. The words “honesty”, “discipline”, “work rate” and “humility” are supposed to represent the club’s key principles. They are woven into the club’s enormously successful community work schemes.
Working at the Feltham Young Offenders Institute, the reoffending rate for inmates who complete their course is 15 per cent against a national average of 65 per cent. Last year, they became the first professional sports club in the world to start their own school, the Saracens High School in Colindale. What happens to these programmes now? Should Wray decide to pull the plug on his near 25-year association with the club, as many insiders fear, then what is left to sell? A loss-making club whose past success is irrevocably tainted. Once again Saracens’ fate is inextricably bound to Wray’s next move.