Worcester are back – and here’s what it means for English rugby’s volatile future
WORCESTER — Gazing round Sixways Stadium in the spring sunshine, your eyes landed on the bright blue-and-yellow logos of Worcester Warriors – never erased in the two and a half years since the club went bust.
Now the Warriors are back, rebooted to play in a reconstituted second-division Championship next season, and the logos have life again – but are they a sign of English clubs getting their financial act together?
“You know that rugby in itself doesn’t make any money, don’t you?” the Warriors’ owner Christopher Holland says to The i Paper. Oh. Okay. Sights duly recalibrated.
The way Holland describes it, he is the unintended owner of two rugby clubs – the other is Wasps. When he became a non-executive director there in 2017, his business expertise was in financial security and disaster recovery (he had been high up in the Ministry of Defence, Marks & Spencer, Sainsburys and B&Q).
The skills came in handy. He owned the training centre Wasps began using in Henley-in-Arden. Then he bought the club’s brand when they went bust, lent money to a consortium hoping to buy Sixways (when he was looking for somewhere temporary for Wasps to play), and that ended in his company with a 999-year lease at the ground, and underwriting the Warriors’ return.
He says he is still pursuing a possible return for Wasps in 2026-27, with plans for a stadium in Kent. If it happens he would have to reduce one of his ownerships to less than 25 per cent.
Meanwhile, Worcester had been a classic case of sporting speculation. The boiler magnate Cecil Duckworth spent big to lift them from the regional leagues and put Worcester on the rugby map.
They bought a prime site outside the city, next to the M5. They never came close to winning the Premiership but they had a few thousand devoted supporters and brought through the former England captain Dylan Hartley, and current internationals Fin Smith, Ollie Lawrence and Ted Hill.
Sixways has stayed in use for non-league football, and the conference-centre business continued. It was just the rugby that failed – co-owners in Jason Whittingham and Colin Goldring who ran out of money, then a takeover bid with no money, either.
Now Holland is expecting the profitability of the stadium and “enabling development” with the local Wychavon Council to cover the debts to be paid, and support the rugby.
There are plans for industrial and retail units, padel courts, a medical centre, a 120-bed hotel, and drive-through electric charging points. This could again be a place for aspirational oval-ball youngsters in the West Midlands.
Holland says Worcester must not rely on a single owner, as that was the “single point of failure” with the Warriors, Wasps and London Irish in 2022-23.
“We’ve signed a football team [Worcester City] here,” Holland said on Thursday. “There’s American football, there’s going to be rugby league, possibly other sports. One thing we’re not going to do is overspend.”
The league Worcester will be entering next season is different to the one they last saw in 2015. Places were put out to tender by the new Tier 2 Board a few months ago, based on meeting sustainability criteria, similar to how the French do it.
Worcester will join the 12 existing Championship clubs – some of whom are being given time to meet the criteria – and the highest-finishing qualifying club from the third-division National One, likely to be Richmond. In essence it’s a franchise system. A rebrand is imminent, perhaps something to engage a younger audience: how about “Champo? Yeah!” or “TT14”?
Are Worcester in the Championship to win it? Briefly bullish, Holland said: “Once you’ve seen the teamsheet for the first time that’ll probably answer most questions.”
The reason Worcester are permitted to return at this level, rather than start again at the foot of the pyramid, is because they have undertaken to pay “rugby creditors” – the likes of players, ex-players, coaches, medics, physiotherapists, strength and conditioning coaches.
Steve Diamond, the former Worcester coach now at Newcastle Falcons, last month said he is in this category. The everyday suppliers of goods and services to the old Warriors will remain out of pocket, presumably chastened by the experience.
Additionally, and very topically, there are HMRC and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), who at the last reported count were owed around £10m in tax and Covid-support loans, respectively.
The chair of Tier 2, Simon Gillham, said on Thursday: “[Worcester] have… entered into agreement with the relevant parties which will result in that the money owed to DCMS and HMRC is all paid back.”
Worcester have lodged a “substantial” financial guarantee in an RFU account. The RFU say this essentially will cover employees if something goes awry.
But what about the Premiership? A league whose strapline might be the old joke of “how can you make a small fortune in rugby? Start out with a large fortune.”
Last month, there was talk of a possible bridging loan to keep Newcastle Falcons going, as they attempt to find new owners.
No one has been promoted from the Championship since Saracens went back up in 2021, and this season’s likely winners Ealing have again failed the Premiership’s entry criteria. Holland said: “There is a big energy to return to that, when we can afford to do so.”
And yet, very quietly in Premiership boardrooms, there is the hope the sparkle of the mega-millions pouring into cricket off the back of The Hundred could rub off on them.
Gillham is on the board of the French media group Vivendi, and he is chairman of former European champions Brive RFC in the French second division. That league shares a bumper TV deal with the mighty Top 14, three times the size of the Premiership’s, with matches broadcast from Thursday to Sunday.
The Championship, by contrast, has next to no exposure and sits firmly outside the £264m professional game partnership struck by the Premiership with the RFU. Talk of a properly aligned Premiership One and Two – that existed briefly in the 1990s – faded away. Gillham says it needs to come back, like the Warriors.
“If we have an exciting Championship and Premiership,” said Gillham, “if you have a promotion and relegation system and knock-out phases where you get thousands of people in the stadiums and real excitement, then you will get a vibrant TV deal, and that’s what you need. If we don’t have a system of aspiration and jeopardy then we will implode.”