Salford Red Devils could face liquidation if action isn’t taken soon by the local council at the start of 2024.
This is because the club require a new tenancy agreement at the AJ Bell Stadium otherwise they will be in breach of the minimum standards set by IMG meaning that they could lose their status as a Super League club in 2025.
With the tenancy agreement expired on December 1st, the club were placed under special measures by the RFL as per reports.
There has been speculation that Salford will lose their Super League status if they fail to reach an agreement but Serious About Rugby League can reveal that the RFL has plans to support Salford no matter what happens.
This is likely due to the threat of liquidation looming large. Losing their place in Super League would cost them massively financially and result in them likely liquidating which means it is no surprise to see Managing Director Paul King hit out at the local council.
He said: “There’s not been an awful lot done at all really. We’re equally waiting for a council response on it. We’re still in the limbo position that we have been for several months now. If not, actually about 18 months or two years.
“It’s serious across multiple levels really. I think one is obviously we have different funding pots, the match funding that can generate up to up to £2 million, the standard mark, and they are utterly reliant upon having heads of terms at the new stadium.”
Asked about working with the council, King said: “We started the conversation three years ago. Obviously Sale wanted to buy the stadium, and fair play to Paul Dennett, stepped in at that point and said he wouldn’t do it and that part of that arrangement was that we would be part of the stadium, so Paul wouldn’t do that; he supported us.
“Since then the conversation has been ongoing about the council buying out so they have sole ownership of the stadium. The politicians seem very keen, the officers seem very slow, if I’m being honest. That’s not personalising it, not mentioning any names, they just need to get a move on. I think, again, three years is a long time for anybody.
“I do get it, I’m not ignorant of the fact that it’s difficult times, it’s a very complex position they’re in; but three years, and at any point if they told us that this was going to be the case three years ago, two years ago, one year ago, six months ago; we might have done something different. As it stands, we’ve got a couple of guys on the board who have put directors loans in just to stretch us.
“We keep trying to stretch ourselves to get to that stage where we can get to this golden point of getting the match funding and the standard mark etc; but we can’t stretch much longer than we have done now. We’ll get to the turn of the year and we’ll be dead set in trouble unless this is resolved.”
On if the club themselves could have done things differently, King added: “Yeah we definitely could. We may have been naïve and trusted them, but I still genuinely believe that they’ll come through. I think if we’d have been informed and kept informed accurately throughout the process, then we might have gone a different route.
“We would have perhaps done a slightly different thing with the playing group, some of our cost base, but we could have changed that. There’s a lot of things we could have changed to help us stretch through it if we’d have known that they weren’t going to come through on time; but we set a budget for 2023 and it was based on food and beverage, standard mark, the full range of community ownership match funding’s and commercial opportunities that we know are sat there. We put all that in and they haven’t come through with it, so they need to in this country quite quickly now.”