‘There is an absolute belief’: Inside Wasps RFC’s grand plans to bounce back from oblivion
The new owners of the six-time league champions reveal how they hope to build an entirely new playing staff, find a new home and keep finances ‘bullet-proof’ as they prepare for life in the Championship
he first question to answer in the story of the rescue of Wasps is… why? Once the Rugby Football Union decided the six-time league champions and twice European Cup winners would be thrown out of the Premiership this season as punishment for going into administration, with £95m of debt, why fight to keep the club alive as a professional entity?
The amateur Wasps FC continues to exist in west London, but the grand plan is to relaunch professional Wasps as a “phoenix” club in the Championship next season.
“The impetus has come from all of the stakeholders,” says Andy Scott, the chief executive of the new company that has bought Wasps’ brand and place in the league structure.
“Our fans have been incredibly supportive, and understanding, and ultimately the club belongs to nobody but them. It’s about creating a legacy for future fans, and I’m proud to call myself one, back from when I left the Army in the mid-1990s. It is exciting and I am honoured to be part of it.”
Key elements of the plan can be revealed or clarified here. The new “plc-style” board comprises Scott; Dame Inga Beale, former chief executive of Lloyd’s of London; Simon Morris, chief creative officer worldwide at Amazon; Chris Braithwaite, former head of Apple’s global real-estate division, plus a financial director.
Scott and Braithwaite represent the influential Wasps Legends Charitable Foundation, who include ex-players Kenny Logan, Peter Scrivener and Mark Rigby, while former captain and director Lawrence Dallaglio is said by Scott to be “not part of the core team but certainly aware of what we are doing”.
Four main steps in the rescue are: a stadium agreement to replace the CBS Arena in Coventry – understood to be a ground-share with the 5,500-capacity Solihull Moors FC, although Scott would only confirm “somewhere in the Midlands”; an obligation to pay rugby creditors; a squad of players, coaches and support staff to succeed those made redundant in October, when only the kitman Pudsey Bevan out of 168 employees was kept on; and an institutional investor, with one preferred party already identified.
The significance of this institutional investor is a move in English club rugby to wean itself off sugar daddies. This in turn is tied into a new rugby regulatory framework being worked on by the RFU and the Premiership for 2024 and beyond.
Christopher Holland, owner of the Wasps training ground in Warwickshire, put up £150,000 to buy the Wasps brand, intellectual property and “chattels” – equipment lying unused in the gym, for instance – and the Legends added working capital.
RFU funding for the Championship, to which Wasps would be relegated under the union’s regulations, is currently around £100,000 per club. So, initially at least, this will be a leaner operation, and international stars including Joe Launchbury, Jack Willis and Dan Robson won’t be returning, while talks are under way with potential coaches.
Geographically, it makes sense to stay close to the training ground. “We were in the Midlands before, and we still are,” says Scott, who has been CEO of 188Bet.
Some would like Wasps to return to their capital roots. “To see Wasps come back to London would be awesome,” Phil Vickery, an eminent former prop, said recently, but added: “Let’s focus on getting the club up and running” – echoing a mood iterated by Scott.
“Just to be able to pull on a black-and-gold jersey on and run out on to a park anywhere is success,” Scott says.
But is a return to the Premiership the goal? “We need to at least secure ourselves in the Championship at the end of the 2023-24 season,” says Scott.
“It’s a tough league. You’ve got the likes of Ealing, and Jersey, and our good friends over in Coventry, who are all doing incredibly well. It would be arrogant to think just by putting money into it, and creating a squad, we’d be promoted at the end of 23-24. It would be phenomenal if we find ourselves in that place. And depending on the institutional investor we land with, they may have more aggressive ambitions.
“We would love to have players who are known and loved by the fans. But we have to be sure we are bringing them back into an environment that is bullet-proof, financially. We cannot put anybody in the kind of situation we found ourselves in a few months ago. To do it once is unforgivable; to do it more than once would be morally obscene.”
Some are bound to be sceptical over Wasps disrupting the Premiership, writing off a pile of debt and then having their place taken by a club of the same name, albeit one rung down the league ladder.
Holland was a non-executive director of the old Wasps, but he has passed the RFU’s fit-and-proper process with “a glowing report”, according to Scott, partly because he had no shareholding in the previous business.
Wasps Holdings Limited was the holding company that owned a subsidiary Arena Coventry Ltd, (ACL) which in turn owned Arena Coventry 2006 Limited and IEC Experience Limited.
ACL, AC06, and IEC are all separate legal entities with their own assets and liabilities, so when they were sold as pre-pack administrations to Mike Ashley’s Frasers Group last month, the proceeds could not go towards paying Wasps creditors.
The major creditors comprise the holders of Wasps’ infamous retail bond at £35.2m, DCMS (Sport England distributed the Government’s Covid survival loans on their behalf) at £14m, HMRC at £7m of unpaid tax, and former owner Derek Richardson at £28m (through personal loans and another Wasps subsidiary, Canmango).
The bondholders and Richardson are “secured creditors”, but they will be paid nothing, unless the 11 remaining Premiership (PRL) shareholder clubs purchase Wasps’ P-share at £9.8m.
At the same time, PRL is contesting how much of the current central distributions Wasps are entitled to receive, and how much Wasps owe it.
Meanwhile, the “preferential creditors”, including former employees, and “secondary preferential creditors”, including HMRC, are set to receive nothing.
Those arrangements fall under the financial law of the land – however there are also sporting regulations, as administered by the RFU, which requires the new owners, Holland’s Halo22 company, to pay off “rugby creditors” estimated to be around £3.4m, and which includes the likes of Munster at £9,000, and former players Brad Shields and Malakai Fekitoa at £77,500 and £115,000 respectively.
“We are going through that process to clarify what it encompasses and we are trying to do the right thing,” says Holland, and the RFU have oversight of this.
The Wasps academy has, for now, been taken under the wing of the RFU. “Wasps women were a long way through being eased across from Wasps FC [the amateurs] to Wasps Holdings, as was, and clearly the administration event caused them huge amounts of trauma and upheaval,” says Scott.
“So they are central. The professional men, the women’s and the academy are all at the heart of what we see as the future of Wasps – alongside a tight integration with the FC, the Wasps Legends, all of those Wasps family members under a closer umbrella.
“There is an absolute belief we can build a viable, resilient, profitable sports business on the back of Wasps that will be here for generations to come.
“We think we’ve got a world-class board, we really want to set the bar for how this is done under the new rugby framework agreement.
“We’ve got a huge, passionate fanbase out there that we need to mobilise and give some good news to – but we’re very mindful we can’t create false hope.
“Once it’s all signed, with everything in place, that’s when I’ll crack open a bottle of champagne, but not before.”
Always a Wasp