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'A lot of Newcastle supporters have said Saracens cheated and deserve to be punished... there is little sympathy'

By Liam Heagney
Saracens' Maro Itoje at Newcastle last season (Photo by David Rogers/Getty Images)

Mick Hogan isn’t pulling his punches a week after salary cap cheats Saracens accepted automatic relegation from the Gallagher Premiership. 

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The sordid unravelling of the London club will go down in history as possibly the most incredible story ever in English domestic rugby, but their guilt has come too late to save Newcastle from the pain and anguish they are enduring following relegation from the top flight last season. 

It was only November when Saracens were retrospectively punished for their off-field accounting shenanigans the previous three seasons, too late to save the Falcons from the financial heartache they are currently experiencing in the second tier.

Managing director Hogan isn’t directly blaming Saracens for the trauma that Newcastle are enduring, Friday night’s trip to Nottingham being the latest pitstop in a season of purgatory. But all the same, belatedly finding out that a rival club had cheated  – and had consistently done so for some time – leaves a sour taste. 

“We were relegated for lots of other reasons. You can’t look at Saracens and say that is the reason for relegation. There were lots of others reasons we ended up in twelfth,” he told RugbyPass in a lengthy interview at the end of an extraordinary week where Premiership Rugby finally published its salary cap investigation for public consumption eleven weeks after its findings resulted in a £5.36million fine and a 35-point Premiership deduction.

(Continue reading below…)

Damning report reveals the extent of the Saracens salary cap breach

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“But every club can feel a grievance because a team has cheated and you know it’s not a level playing field. Ultimately, they are the rules. It doesn’t matter whether you agree with them or not, they are the rules that have set and have been set for a number of years now and you have got to abide by them.

“A lot of our supporters, the ones that I have spoken to, have said, ‘Look, at the end of the day they are cheating and deserve to be punished’. One or two think the relegation is too severe and one or two think it’s regrettable. But there is little sympathy. 

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“I really think there is little sympathy amongst rugby fans because some of the fans have sensed and suspected it [salary cap cheating] for years and certainly fans of other clubs have a lot stronger feelings. 

“If you look at the Saracens team you would have thought, ‘How do you get all that under the current salary cap?’ They do have an excellent academy, don’t get me wrong. They do produce a lot of their own players and they should be commended for that.

“But once players reach a certain level, that is international level, it doesn’t matter if they have come through your academy or not they expect quite rightly to be recompensed as an international or a Lions player and they aren’t cheap. In some ways, they are victims of their own success.

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“The punishment that has been handed out, the second punishment is obviously quite severe. It’s given because of what is considered to be the scale of the breach and although some people say it renders the bottom half of the table this season almost pointless because you know Saracens are going to be the team that is relegated, I’d rather this being done in season than retrospectively at the end of the season once everything is known. 

“Personally, I’d commend Premiership Rugby for acting so quickly. One of the limitations of the punishment that was imposed on the previous three seasons is that it has been done after the event and it has not had any effect on the three seasons where the salary cap breaches were evident. 

“It’s a penalty post those three seasons. I know for some people that has not been satisfactory because you want whatever the punishment is to be applicable to the season when the transgression was made. That wasn’t possible with the first punishment but this one is within the season where they are evidently not going to get under the cap.

“The salary cap is a quite rigorous process but ultimately it can only so far. Legally it can’t look into private banking accounts and there has got be a degree of good faith and accepting what has been submitted. 

“So I don’t think you can blame the system, I don’t think you can blame the audit because it is as thorough and as rigorous as it can be. Ultimately, this one has come down to interpretation, Saracens believing that what they did was within the rules or sat outside the cap, but it has been proved not to have been and they have suffered the various penalties.”

Relegation has been a brutal ordeal for Newcastle. Before their fate was sealed, Hogan had warned last March that its consequences were potentially devastating, telling RugbyPass: “Unfortunately people lose jobs when teams get relegated, whether that is staff, whether it is players or whether it is coaches, whatever. But we know that and that is what we have got to deal with. No job is guaranteed in life, never mind in sport. That’s the harsh reality of it.”

Nine months on, the cloth cutting has been severe even if the dreaded job cuts were avoided. In the Premiership, they enjoyed an average attendance of 9,166 and a high of 27,284 attending their annual marquee match promotion at the football cathedral of St James’ Park.

Down in the Championship, though, a tournament where six of its twelve participants are somehow existing despite average attendances of below 1,000, Newcastle have attracted an average 4,433 for their four home league games so far. 

It has been tough for Hogan and co to keep the show on the road and even if they do get promotion back to the top flight, he fears it might not be until 2021/22 when the club has finally financially regained the ground lost due to relegation. 

“Commercially it hurts you and it doesn’t just hurt you for one season. It will take at least next year and potentially until the season after to fully get back to where you were,” he suggested, explains the ramifications of what a fall from grace does to a club.

“We were lucky that all of our sponsors remained with us but with each other of those sponsors, they have either paid a slightly reduced rate because there is a relegation clause in there or we have kept the fee the same but have had to deliver additional commercial rights which is effectively a cost to the club. 

“So relegation affects sponsorship, but the biggest area it affects is gates and it is two-fold. You get lower attendances and the average ticket yield reduces as well because, no disrespect to some of the opposition we play in the Championship, fans want to see the likes of Leicester, Saracens, Bath, Wasps, the big names, the international players, and the names are less well known in the Championship. 

“As has been proven so far this season there is amongst the fans – certainly not the team – a level of inevitability about results. Ultimately, people want to see close contests with the result in the balance until the final whistle. That is any sport, not just rugby. And when you get a series of games where one team wins and wins quite comfortably in a number of games then that will affect ticket sales. 

“On and off the field we have had a recruitment freeze. People that were in jobs maintained their positions but in some cases, there has been a reduction of salaries or we have not been able to invest as much as we want to in certain staff, so that is on hold until we get promoted because ultimately our revenues are down and we can’t support our plans to grow the club off the field. 

“There are other things as well. The annual game at St James’ Park, we didn’t put it on this year because we ran the numbers every way and the game would have probably ended up losing money, so we couldn’t risk that.

“A lot of the fans that come to that event, it’s their first or only experience of club rugby that year because our average attendance jumps from 7,500/8,000 to 30,000. We are finding well over 20,000 new fans for that game but with the best will in the world, they are not going to come to watch a game in the Championship, so that event loses its momentum. 

“There is every chance we will get it back on again next year but it’s almost like starting from scratch. It has definitely taken a step back with that big event for us. It’s not just about the increased revenue it gets, it gives rugby a higher profile within the region for that weekend and that is about long-term growth, getting more people interested because we are in a part of the country where there is the least amount of rugby participation and that has always been the case. 

‘I can understand why some of the fans haven’t been this year but it is doubly hard to get that habit (of going to games) back. Every club has a churn of supporters, you try to minimise that and what you hope is the new people you bring in are bigger than the churn.

“That is what we have been able to do over the last few years. We have more than doubled our average attendance in five years between 2014 and 2019. The average used to be just over 5,000 and it jumped to over 10,000 in the Premiership. 

“It helps when you’re able to move games but we will jump back down to probably around between 5,000 and 6,000 this year on average so it’s quite a reduction and that has implications. Backstage, you sell less beer, fewer programmes, your advertising is not worth as much. Fewer ticket sales in itself is considerable but there are implications on other revenue areas as well.”

When their likely promotion is eventually confirmed, Newcastle’s books will be checked by a salary cap audit to ensure everything is above board for their return to the Premiership where the basic wages ceiling is £7m, something the Falcons have never been troubled by. This season alone their wage bill was considerably lightened by loaning England’s Mark Wilson to Sale and allowing Scotland’s Chris Harris to join Gloucester amongst other switches.

“At Newcastle, we would have one of the smallest if not the smallest salary. We are one of the smaller clubs for all the reasons I spoke about, we’re not in a traditional rugby area. We have salary cap space. There has never been a season where we have had to rely on credits or injury dispensation or marquee players to get under the cap. We are quite comfortably under the cap. 

“Yes, it would remain an ambition of the club to be able to spend up near the cap, but we have one of the smallest spend on players and that is just trying to maintain the club in a sustainable way as possible – and we still make losses like nearly every other club. We’re ambitious, we push it as far as we can but we don’t have the resources to go and spend what many other clubs do.”

WATCH: Andy Goode and ex-club boss Brendan Venter get into a heated debate on The Rugby Pod over Saracens salary scandal

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Jon 5 hours ago
Jake White: Are modern rugby players actually better?

This is the problem with conservative mindsets and phycology, and homogenous sports, everybody wants to be the same, use the i-win template. Athlete wise everyone has to have muscles and work at the gym to make themselves more likely to hold on that one tackle. Do those players even wonder if they are now more likely to be tackled by that player as a result of there “work”? Really though, too many questions, Jake. Is it better Jake? Yes, because you still have that rugby of ole that you talk about. Is it at the highest International level anymore? No, but you go to your club or checkout your representative side and still engage with that ‘beautiful game’. Could you also have a bit of that at the top if coaches encouraged there team to play and incentivized players like Damian McKenzie and Ange Capuozzo? Of course we could. Sadly Rugby doesn’t, or didn’t, really know what direction to go when professionalism came. Things like the state of northern pitches didn’t help. Over the last two or three decades I feel like I’ve been fortunate to have all that Jake wants. There was International quality Super Rugby to adore, then the next level below I could watch club mates, pulling 9 to 5s, take on the countries best in representative rugby. Rugby played with flair and not too much riding on the consequences. It was beautiful. That largely still exists today, but with the world of rugby not quite getting things right, the picture is now being painted in NZ that that level of rugby is not required in the “pathway” to Super Rugby or All Black rugby. You might wonder if NZR is right and the pathway shouldn’t include the ‘amateur’, but let me tell you, even though the NPC might be made up of people still having to pull 9-5s, we know these people still have dreams to get out of that, and aren’t likely to give them. They will be lost. That will put a real strain on the concept of whether “visceral thrill, derring-do and joyful abandon” type rugby will remain under the professional level here in NZ. I think at some point that can be eroded as well. If only wanting the best athlete’s at the top level wasn’t enough to lose that, shutting off the next group, or level, or rugby players from easy access to express and showcase themselves certainly will. That all comes back around to the same question of professionalism in rugby and whether it got things right, and rugby is better now. Maybe the answer is turning into a “no”?

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j
john 7 hours ago
Will the Crusaders' decline spark a slow death for New Zealand rugby?

But here in Australia we were told Penney was another gun kiwi coach, for the Tahs…….and yet again it turned out the kiwi coach was completely useless. Another con job on Australian rugby. As was Robbie Deans, as was Dave Rennie. Both coaches dumped from NZ and promoted to Australia as our saviour. And the Tahs lap them up knowing they are second rate and knowing that under pressure when their short comings are exposed in Australia as well, that they will fall in below the largest most powerful province and choose second rate Tah players to save their jobs. As they do and exactly as Joe Schmidt will do. Gauranteed. Schmidt was dumped by NZ too. That’s why he went overseas. That why kiwi coaches take jobs in Australia, to try and prove they are not as bad as NZ thought they were. Then when they get found out they try and ingratiate themselves to NZ again by dragging Australian teams down with ridiculous selections and game plans. NZ rugby’s biggest problem is that it can’t yet transition from MCaw Cheatism. They just don’t know how to try and win on your merits. It is still always a contest to see how much cheating you can get away with. Without a cheating genius like McCaw, they are struggling. This I think is why my wise old mate in NZ thinks Robertson will struggle. The Crusaders are the nursery of McCaw Cheatism. Sean Fitzpatrick was probably the father of it. Robertson doesn’t know anything else but other countries have worked it out.

30 Go to comments
A
Adrian 9 hours ago
Will the Crusaders' decline spark a slow death for New Zealand rugby?

Thanks Nick The loss of players to OS, injury and retirement is certainly not helping the Crusaders. Ditto the coach. IMO Penny is there to hold the fort and cop the flak until new players and a new coach come through,…and that's understood and accepted by Penny and the Crusaders hierarchy. I think though that what is happening with the Crusaders is an indicator of what is happening with the other NZ SRP teams…..and the other SRP teams for that matter. Not enough money. The money has come via the SR competition and it’s not there anymore. It's in France, Japan and England. Unless or until something is done to make SR more SELLABLE to the NZ/Australia Rugby market AND the world rugby market the $s to keep both the very best players and the next rung down won't be there. They will play away from NZ more and more. I think though that NZ will continue to produce the players and the coaches of sufficient strength for NZ to have the capacity to stay at the top. Whether they do stay at the top as an international team will depend upon whether the money flowing to SRP is somehow restored, or NZ teams play in the Japan comp, or NZ opts to pick from anywhere. As a follower of many sports I’d have to say that the organisation and promotion of Super Rugby has been for the last 20 years closest to the worst I’ve ever seen. This hasn't necessarily been caused by NZ, but it’s happened. Perhaps it can be fixed, perhaps not. The Crusaders are I think a symptom of this, not the cause

30 Go to comments
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Trevor 12 hours ago
Will forgotten Wallabies fit the Joe Schmidt model?

Thanks Brett.. At last a positive article on the potential of Wallaby candidates, great to read. Schmidt’s record as an international rugby coach speaks for itself, I’m somewhat confident he will turn the Wallaby’s fortunes around …. on the field. It will be up to others to steady the ship off the paddock. But is there a flaw in my optimism? We have known all along that Australia has the players to be very competitive with their international rivals. We know that because everyone keeps telling us. So why the poor results? A question that requires a definitive answer before the turn around can occur. Joe Schmidt signed on for 2 years, time to encompass the Lions tour of 2025. By all accounts he puts family first and that’s fair enough, but I would wager that his 2 year contract will be extended if the next 18 months or so shows the statement “Australia has the players” proves to be correct. The new coach does not have a lot of time to meld together an outfit that will be competitive in the Rugby Championship - it will be interesting to see what happens. It will be interesting to see what happens with Giteau law, the new Wallaby coach has already verbalised that he would to prefer to select from those who play their rugby in Australia. His first test in charge is in July just over 3 months away .. not a long time. I for one wish him well .. heaven knows Australia needs some positive vibes.

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