Listening to Stephen Vaughan on the rugby pod, If there is to be wasps team next year it is highly likely that we will still be playing at the CBS. Really interesting listen….
Chose his words about Derek very carefully I thought
I haven't listened, but his interview in the Cov Tel was very pointed indeed. I was always under the impression that the CEO was where the buck stopped, but it must be nice for him to have a convenient scapegoat to pass all the blame onto.
I've just listened and my takeaway was that he was brought in to run the sports business and that Dereck was hands off. Without going back through the press I think that was made clear when he was appointed.
I know he's talking his own book, but taking him at face value he made lots of changes to the way the business was run and even turned an operating profit, but the debt overhang was too much in the end.
He didn't hang Dereck out and pointed out Dereck had kept on funding the business. During his discussion on the business model he made it quite clear that the problem is that it relies on very wealthy owners and the cost to those owners is rising. He said something of the lines of funding clubs has gone from £1m to £4 to £5m and the fun goes out of it for owners who are all very high net worth people and have to think about their families.
The only note of bitterness I detected was when he said that 5 minutes ago 14 clubs was the solution and now its 10 clubs.
He said he's working for free to try to put a Championship club together and a number of players have said they want to be involved, some of them senior. He also said that even internationals are getting fairly poor offers, 50% of their current package.
Overall I thought he was open and candid within the bounds of respecting confidentialities and individuals and it is worth a listen because he has some for interesting thoughts on how the game is run and where it goes from here..
Always a Wasp