Worcester blame game proves need for financial transparency in Premiership

“It is becoming clear that Worcester will fall apart as a rugby entity before it falls apart as a financial entity.”

At the end of August, a Government source offered a suggestion that has proven to be as prescient as it was chilling. Wednesday, and the liquidation of WRFC Players Ltd, fulfilled that forecast as players and staff – a group of around 200 people – were thrust into unemployment following a 22-second hearing.

Ultimately, their personal and professional lives, as well as the passions of loyal supporters, have ended up as the mangled collateral damage of a slow-motion car-crash.

Understandably, anger and blame abound because the Worcester debacle is a catastrophic failing of the collective that has encouraged calls for a Parliamentary inquiry into how the Rugby Football Union, Premiership Rugby and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport allowed the club to collapse.

Everyone, media included, needs to look in the mirror. On August 17, Telegraph Sport reported that HMRC had issued WRFC Players Ltd with a winding-up petition. This accelerated matters in more ways than one, and certainly with regard to coverage from national publications.

Before then, in the summer of 2020, news of Michael Fatialofa’s unpaid medical bills had triggered some curiosity and disquiet. Towards the end of last season, The Daily Mail revealed that players were considering legal action over delayed wages.

BBC Hereford & Worcester and Worcester News have monitored matters closely, as have various Twitter accounts, including the astute @SPKeene. But joining the dots required a painstaking, 18-month investigation.

On Wednesday evening, Michael Aylwin of the Guardian published an assiduous deep-dive into Worcester’s labyrinthine corporate network, which he began in March of last year after a tip-off “that something was not right on Companies House”.

As with the Saracens salary cap scandal, the evidence was there in the accounts for a journalist with the time and expertise to start investigating. Given the red flags, should more pressure have been applied?

As the concussion crisis attests, rugby union has an awkward history of this. Duhan van der Merwe playing in the Premiership felt like a Good Thing, if you did not think too hard about where the money came from. This is not to denigrate Van der Merwe himself, of course. Players, staff and supporters of Worcester cannot be blamed – as hard as Colin Goldring and Jason Whittingham, the Warriors co-owners, tried in their contemptuous reply to ITV Central last week.

If the media could have done more to uncover an unfolding scandal, the governing bodies should have done more. Regarding the Warriors co-owners, an obvious question is how they reached their position. In August, the Rugby Football Union briefed that their board had to be satisfied with two things in order to approve a change of ownership: the reputability of new owners and financial stability.

It was noted that Goldring and Whttingham had passed the English Football League’s owners’ and directors’ test. A fortnight later, it emerged that Goldring had, in fact, failed it. That blew a big hole in the RFU’s go-to response. Had there really been much scrutiny from their board?

Senior figures at Premiership Rugby Limited are known to covet the Ligue Nationale de Rugby’s model of club funding in France, where budgets must be outlined before the start of each season, yet know it will take time to implement – as most things tend to do with PRL’s governance protocols.

“The most important thing, and maybe the least sexy thing, is financial discipline,” said Simon Gillham, the president of Brive, in a recent interview with the Mail on Sunday about the fiscal solidity of the Top 14.

 “You can’t pretend that you’ve got money that you don’t have,” Gillham added. In the Premiership, as Goldring and Whittingham have shown, you sort of can.

One of Simon Massie-Taylor’s aims is for PRL to have “better visibility” of club finances. This should avoid crises like that which Goldring and Whittingham wrought on Warriors.

It might, for instance, have made it more difficult for Worcester to secure loans or for a web of companies to become so tangled that rugby matters crumbled while two other businesses remained in administration. The irony is that Saracens’ salary cap scandal also yielded calls for transparency and greater autonomy for PRL to make unilateral decisions. How many more calamities will it take?

Guarding against future misdemeanors will not console Warriors fans. Little can. Equally, think of the frustration felt by Ealing Trailfinders as they press their noses to the fence and look in on such a chaotic scene. Accountability is vital.

The decision to allow Worcester to begin this Premiership campaign, surely made before the depth of their plight had been made clear to all parties, has not aged well because another season is now compromised.

Crucially, as much as the respective scenarios differ, PRL must be as consistent as possible in how they deal with Wasps if and when that situation – seemingly on a nervous countdown – comes to a head.

More messy days lie ahead. Julie Palmer, one of Worcester’s joint administrators, intends to appeal against relegation. Lawrence Dallaglio, a Wasps director as well as a BT Sport pundit, did not bother to dress up his attraction to the RFU’s no-fault insolvency clause before Newcastle Falcons’ win over Bristol Bears.

“There’s a difference between mismanagement going into administration and a pandemic sending a club into administration,” he said in a very deliberate tone. “I think the governing body should remember that.”

The hope is that any movement of ‘P’ shares happens sensibly and sympathetically after administration, where applicable, has unpicked complications with sales completed and competition structures for 2023-24 finalised.

Unfortunately, short-term pain, inflicted on the innocent, is unavoidable. There is next to no hope of Premiership salary-cap exemptions for the players cast adrift and consumed by anxiety.

Staff, many of them specialists, must negotiate a skinny job market as well. Supporters of Worcester Warriors will feel bereft.

After tears and a torrent of blame, this season has to be a line in the sand.