Worcester’s chances of resurrecting as an elite club are at risk of collapse with prospective new owners struggling to meet RFU financial demands to enter next season’s Championship.
The Atlas Worcester Warriors consortium has challenged the RFU to ease “overzealous and draconian” financial scrutiny, to allow their reformation of the club that fell into administration in September.
Former Warriors chief executive Jim O’Toole and James Sandford front the consortium awarded preferred bidder status by administrators Begbies Traynor.
The RFU board will meet on Friday to look further on both stricken clubs Worcester and Wasps’ cases to be allowed entry into next term’s Championship.
“The RFU board will be meeting to discuss this matter on Friday and we won’t be commenting formally on a decision which has not been made,” said an RFU spokesperson.
O’Toole’s consortium’s bid appears to have hit insurmountable problems, and any collapse could yet see the RFU ask administrators Begbies Taylor to look again at other bids.
That would bring Steve Diamond’s previously overlooked consortium back into the running, with the former Warriors coach tweeting on Thursday: “We have the plan and the funding, give us the opportunity. We will give you the rugby.”
The administrators would still have the power to press through with the sale to Atlas though, which would leave Worcester either without a rugby club – or a team that would have to reform at the bottom of the grassroots pyramid.
An angry O’Toole has pulled no punches in criticism of the RFU position.
“We will happily, happily, be the most financially scrutinised rugby club in England,” O’Toole told Standard Sport. “None of the other professional rugby clubs in England will have one tenth the degree of scrutiny we will be under, but that is absolutely fine.
“We accept that we have to pay the price for the misdemeanours of the past. We didn’t do it, it wasn’t our fault, and ultimately we’re trying to rescue this club.
“Errors have been made in the past, so in an effort to show they have learned from those lessons, they are being, we believe, overzealous and draconian in the way they are approaching this situation.”
The Atlas consortium posted a lengthy statement on social media on Thursday, amid frustration with the RFU’s stance on financial oversight.
O’Toole said the Atlas group held a second meeting on Friday with rugby’s Club Financial Viability Group, which includes RFU, Premiership and Championship representatives as well as insolvency experts.
The RFU are demanding control that no sane businessman would agree to.
The prospective Worcester owners left that meeting confident of meeting all RFU stipulations, but now say new “conditionality” terms attached to the governing body’s green light stretch too far.
The Atlas consortium’s rescue plan for Worcester involves commercial development of the land attached to the Warriors’ Sixways Stadium. O’Toole believes that development will be critical to creating sustainable elite rugby in Worcester, but insisted the Atlas consortium will draw a line at ceding what they believe to be commercial control to the RFU.
“We’ve got a very viable business plan and a very viable development plan, and it is the fundamental strand of our entire strategy that the land needs commercial development to support a rugby club,” said O’Toole. “All the previous models that have been tried do not work, you need to develop your assets.
“So the RFU are demanding control over how we do that, and no sane businessman let alone an investor in a new business would agree to these terms. We’re prepared to sit down and be flexible about it, as flexible as we possibly can be but the conditionality now attached is too much.
“There’s plenty we’re happy to cede and collaborate on, but they are being, we believe, overreaching, overzealous and going completely outside the terms of their remit as the regulator of the sport.
“They are trying to turn themselves into a financial control body which they are not.”
