CEO reveals star player and referee suffered death threats around Challenge Cup Final

Last season as Warrington Wolves struggled, many people at the club, players, coaches and other staff, were subject to plenty of criticism though this sadly bled into abuse.

However Warrington Wolves CEO Karl Fitzpatrick has said that this motivated him and the club more:

“It does make you more determined 100%, but look we had a plan when we interviewed Daryl. He said ‘look this is a rebuild’. We didn’t envisage that it would turn out like it did but we knew there was going to be a high turnover of players.

“We had 14 players off contract and we retained two, so within that you’ve got instability. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a psychological framework and motivational theory and one of the foundations is safety, we took that away from 12 players. As human beings are they going to be totally for the cause? I can’t blame the players for thinking ahead, so having that created uncertainty in the camp.

“After games we’d go and meet in this café and it was like The Apprentice. Do you know when things have gone wrong and they dissect it?”

Sadly, Fitzpatrick revealed some awful emails he received last season:

Emails: “It was like eff out of our club, I remember one was like ‘eff out of our club, you’re more interested in merchandise sales than winning games.’

“When you’re a leader of an organisation when things aren’t going great you gave to put your shoulders back and find positives because people are looking at you and how you react.”

Fitzpatrick also revealed that Josh Charnley and Robert Hicks received death threats:

“Over the past couple of years some of our players have received death threats. We had Josh Charnley and another one was Robert Hicks. Before the 2019 Challenge Cup Final had death threats from these supporters. It would be something like comments on Twitter.”

This is something becoming more and more common in sport and needs to be stamped out.