Diamond makes bolshy 'USP' claim about his Worcester takeover bid

Steve Diamond has claimed he is the unique selling point in his consortium bidding to take over the financially stricken Worcester. The out-of-work director of rugby was in charge when the Warriors played their last Gallagher Premiership match in September before going to the wall, and he has now popped his head back above the parapet with his ambitious plan to become the chief executive of Sixways Village, the investor group looking to rescue the club from administration.

Diamond made his intentions known on Thursday during a 15-minute slide presentation to the media that he had shown just hours previously to RFU CEO Bill Sweeney. The ex-Sale boss doesn’t know whether his group’s bid is the only option in the running to take over Worcester and get the club back playing in next season’s Championship.

What he did insist, though, was that his presence made this particular bid special as he explained he was a rare breed in the English game having coached for years with Sale, a job he combined at times with the role of club CEO.

In a lengthy Q&A session that followed his slide presentation about his Worcester takeover plan, Diamond said: “To be fair, the USP is me because there are not too many people around who have done the business side of these rugby clubs and the rugby side, and you have got to have a certain amount of charisma around you to convince people to come to the Championship.

“You have got to have a certain amount of charisma about you and know-how and track record to get investors to come in and see the plan for five to ten years, not a quick, ‘Here, let’s make some money on the property’ which nobody can ever do because as we know a lot of it through the covenants has got to help the rugby business to create and sustain the legacy that the Duckworth family put in place which has been marginalised, to say the least.

“I have got my investors in place, I have got my senior management in place, I have got the high-performance department in place ready to go. That needs to be in situ immediately. You would be fooling yourself to think you can turn up next July and put a team out in the Championship, so the recruitment has to be done now. They are players out of contract as we know.

“There are about 20 players from Worcester who have got jobs through the assistance of me and the RPA and their agents and there are numerous people at Wasps getting positions. Putting a team together, a lot of people think it will be easy when they say there are so many players out but getting that combination right, you have got to have been in the game like I have to do it and there are three or four people who could do that only.”

Diamond added that he wasn’t fully sure if there were going to be rival bids to rescue Worcester. “I don’t know if I am honest. I think there is more than one horse in the race but up until now, we have just been beavering bing the scenes, making sure we understand the numbers, understand the ramifications of having the P share, not having the P share, making sure the model works without it.

“It’s a bit of a phantom the P share. Not many people understand it… the business has to learn and evolve organically so that it can operate without a handout and the model I have run in Manchester (at Sale) for several years enables businesses to stand on their own two feet.

“What I found at Worcester in the eight, nine, ten months I was there was a really enthusiastic, skilled workforce who have not been treated with any respect by the previous incumbents… The days of blaming are gone. The emotion when these things happen, the first thing we do as humans is not look in the mirror.

“The very fact that wealthy owners have supported the sport, the RFU have supported the sport and PRL have supported the sport for 26, 27 years now is a testament to those people. What has happened at Worcester is unfortunate and there are ramifications for that, we will go through a process with the administrators and the insolvency service.

“What has happened at Wasps is unfortunate but the RFU and PRL don’t own those clubs. They have some control of governance but they are not in charge of the purse strings so each club has to look at its own manifesto and decide how they are going to rock for the next three to five years and if they can cope with it… the biggest expense in the business is the wages.

“I have been around a long time and there are not too many people waving chequebooks to buy sports clubs. We have been unfortunate with what is on the record about the Worcester owners but the chap who has fallen on uncertain times at Wasps is a real credible businessman. Occasionally things get through the net but the RFU and PRL are addressing that and hopefully, we see no more of this.

“It is easy to blame people and make excuses but we have also had a pandemic which everybody has forgotten about and it has been difficult for these businesses to run. Looking at the future, if I can control the costs and my team can control the revenue-building processes that will be put in place then I think we can run a sustainable business.”