Derek Beaumont has revealed that he made it appear that he was walking out of Leigh, then the Centurions now the Leopards, after some financial struggles in order to get the deals he needed to rebuild the club after relegation.
On the Eddie and Stevo podcast:
“My role at Leigh brings me a lot of stress but there is a misconception that I walked away. In 2018 I didn’t walk away, but I had to give the perception that I had walked away.
“This was because the club had come out of Super League and then we didn’t make the middle eights. So we literally went from a £2 million squad, we went down with a parachute of £500,000 so we had about £900,000 of central distribution.
“Then by not making the playoffs we were down to less that £200,000, that was too big of an amount of money for me to be dealing with in a year.
“If the players and agents knew I was staying in and I was just going to rebuild, putting the money down and going again, they would never have done the deals they did with me.
“Would I have gone then? I would have gone then because I made the club openly available for someone to come in and have my shares.
“I got everything down to zero. There was £100,000 of Sky money that came in on the December and I hadn’t sold any of the assets, none of the season tickets or merchandise was sold and no players were signed so there was a brand new baby there to nurse how they saw fit.
“Nobody came forward. So I had a year still running it which was a bit more chilled out. We had a local coach in John Duffy, and back some local players, Martyn Ridyard and player like that.
“We outperformed for the budget and then got in the playoffs and I felt better and since then we’ve really gone again.”
