
Wakefield Trinity are a team who, despite languishing at the bottom of Super League, are massively trending up and that’s down to their impressive form of late, their stadium developments ahead of IMG and also the current talks of being bought out by a new investor.
It’s been confirmed that Matt Ellis is in the process of buying the club with the process of due diligence taking place at present, but seemingly some rumours of the deal stalling have circulated around the Trinity faithful.
To counter this outgoing chairman John Minards has provided an update with a video uploaded to the team’s website and shared via social media.
“I wanted to talk to you specifically about the potential acquisition of the club by Matt Ellis which as everybody will know has been ongoing and we’ve been discussing for a few months now,” Mindards began by explaining.
“I’m receiving a lot of inbound traffic that a number of our supporters and some of our most loyal supporters are disturbed by rumours that they’re hearing and things that they’re reading. And it’s upsetting to them and disturbing to them.
“All of this just at the time when the club should be absolutely pulling together and building on the recent run of form and the fantastic performance that we put out last Sunday against Warrington in driving us forward to survival this year in the Super League and taking us on forward.
“Let me set out the situation to you very clearly. As you will know, we have been talking with Matt Ellis and his advisors for two or three months now around a potential acquisition by them of the club whereby they would invest many millions of pounds over the years and have great plans and ambition for the club to take it back up where we all want it to see.
“Nobody is blocking the deal, least of all me. And secondly, and I can confirm this following an exchange with Matt Ellis this afternoon, nobody is on the point of walking away from a deal.
“What is now proceeding is what is known as due diligence. What that means is that Matt and his team have to learn a little bit more about the detail of where we are here and what goes on and how it runs. We similarly want to find out a little bit more about his plans and his intent and his capabilities and his team and so on.
“We’re having some negotiations on some specific points, which clearly I’m not going to go into publicly, but it’s absolutely normal practice. But what I want to stress is that Matt and I, and Michael, are absolutely clear that we want this transaction to proceed forward. We’re confident that it will. We can’t say when it will, but we are keen that it moves forward.
“Matt is helping us also with some funding, as we’ve already announced, through sponsorship to help us, in part, pay for some of the deals that we’d already done to bring in a couple of key players, Luke and Dave in particular, and also helping us fund some of the other players that you’ve seen come in and out in the period since. So this is all tremendously helpful.”
With that cleared up and explained Minards moved onto the positive nature and mood at Belle Vue currently, urging fans to get behind the side as they attempt to complete what looked like a very unlikely escape.
“It’s translating into a real upturn on the field, which is what we all want to see. As I said at the beginning, we all want to see success on the field, survival this year, move on into next year. And we’re confident that we’ll be able to resolve any negotiations that we’re having at the moment and everybody’s got an intent to make this happen.
“Everybody needs to be pulling together as ever now with Wakefield Trinity to ensure that we do survive in the Super League this year and we can crack on forward next year, accumulate all the points we need from under the IMG criteria to establish ourselves as a permanent Super League club and then push on to winning things going forward.
“I don’t know the motivations behind people putting this sort of stuff out, that’s a matter for them, I’m really not interested. What I am interested in is the future success of Wakefield Trinity. That’s what I’m committed to.”
Trinity head to the KCOM to face Hull FC and Sunday and depending on if Castleford lose by 12 or more points then they could find themselves lifted off bottom for the first time since the start of the season,
