Featherstone Rovers Chairman Mark Campbell has confirmed that once he has resolved the club’s cash flow problems.
It is a rotten shame to see the club in this situation after some strong seasons in the Championship. They are undoubtedly the biggest side to never play in the Super League and for all their investment and ambition they never made it to the top tier and in a lot of ways their hopes of playing in Super League are over at least for now because of IMG’s gradings.
In many ways, this is why the club have found themselves with cashflow issues and why Campbell has chosen to step down from Featherstone Rovers with the door shut on their promotion hopes.
Featherstone Rovers Chairman takes aim at IMG
Thus, unsurprisingly, Campbell noted IMG in his statement as he confirmed he would be leaving the club.
He said they had “firmly shut” the door on their promotion hopes.
“I think all of our supporters need to know that for the last two years, we spent like a Super League Club to ensure we got promoted. We did this on £80k broadcast distribution per annum, not the £1.4M of our Super League counterparts and we did this to achieve Super League promotion before the IMG door was firmly shut this season.”
He added: “For the last two years, this Club has left no stone unturned in seeking promotion to Super League. We all know that, from this season, the door is firmly shut for good on Super League for Clubs like ours because of the IMG criteria so we had to speculate if we were to achieve this long-standing objective.”
He also revealed how much work he and the club put into trying to get the club promoted to Super League: “We did build a team of the highest paid players in the Championship, that won the league by a huge margin but once again failed on the big occasion, a team that were paid on time every time during those two seasons. We did speculate on the back of significant investment from myself and Steven Clough (this is now in excess of £1.7M), unprecedented commercial investment in the Club brought in by Martin Vickers (£600k within the last 2 years) but unfortunately that investment was unsuccessful. It is worth noting that the Club spent on salaries in the last 2 years circa £2.2m, there is currently £8.5k owed in respect of unpaid salaries from the 23 season.”
