Salford Red Devils “will die” if council don’t take action warns Managing Director

In recent years we have seen Salford Red Devils compete with the likes of Leeds Rhinos, Wigan Warriors and St Helens at the top of the league but they now face liquidation.

On Thursday 9th November Salford issued a statement claiming that the club faced extinction due to the inaction of the local council with regards to the stadium with their tenancy agreement expiring in December 2023.

This could have disastrous consequences for the club who would be in breach of IMG’s minimum standards which would lead to them likely losing their place in Super League and potentially culminate in their extinction.

Managing Director Paul King explained on BBC North West how the club “would die” if the situation is not remedied.

“The easy solution is for the the council to do what they promised to do and not backtrack or delay on promises they have been making for the last three years,” King said.

“In essence what it would mean is for a 12 month extension on current terms. A failure to do so would kick us out of the top 12 and we wouldn’t be Super League in 2025 and we would lose £1.2 million in distributions and the best we could get is at a new local smaller stadium but at that point who is playing for you?

“We would try really hard with events in and out of the city but we would die. Yes we would die.”

In the club’s statement earlier this week, they outlined a number of complaints with the council saying:

“A benefit of our transition to community ownership earlier this year was that we were able to stretch funds to reach the conclusion of the stadium deal, under the belief that we were months away. Not only has this failed to materialise, but the dithering has also restricted our ability to access the matched funding opportunities that are dependent on having heads of terms of the stadium deal.

“Discussions around access to state aid are still ongoing after 12 months, throughout which the Club were asked to produce a business plan without knowing details relating to incomes or costs associated with the stadium deal.

“The Club were also promised a percentage of food & beverage sales from February 2023. The failure to progress the stadium deal has resulted in a significant loss to budget.

“Despite StadCo retaining 100% of F&B sales on Salford Red Devils matchdays, and StadCo taking an additional minimum 8% of our ticketing, there has been a developing narrative that the Club is not paying its way, when in reality the unfavourable terms of the current tenancy agreement is extracting from the Club’s key income sources, on top of rent.

“A car parking price hike was introduced a week prior to our 2023 season starting, which costs the Club an unbudgeted £1k per matchday.

“Following assured income failing to materialise, the Club took a loan of £175k from the Council and are now subsequently making repayments with interest on a loan that had the expected progress been made, would never have been needed.”