Furious Steve Diamond blasts the Atlas plan for Worcester

Steve Diamond has slammed the plan by new owners Jim O’Toole and James Sandford to rebrand Worcester Warriors as Sixways Rugby and amalgamate with Stourbridge RFC and play in the lower leagues in England. Under pressure to meet an RFU deadline extended to February 14, the Atlas Group decided not to agree to the demands made by English Rugby HQ so that Worcester would be cleared to participate in the 2023/24 Championship.

Instead of paying off the creditors owed after the collapse of the club under previous owners Colin Goldring and Jason Whittingham, Atlas unveiled a plan on Thursday to shut down the Worcester Warriors business and start up a team with a new name so as to avoid settling the debts accumulated when the club was part of the Gallagher Premiership.

Despite allegedly failing an RFU fit and proper test to become the owners of Worcester, Atlas remained the preferred bidder of the administrator, Begbies Traynor, and a takeover deal was finally announced on February 1. At the time it was felt that the agreement paved the way for Worcester to return to rugby at the second-tier Championship level next September, but it hasn’t turned out that way.

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The news that the Atlas Group had taken over was quickly met by a frosty response from the RFU, who reiterated that its demands had not been met. This was then followed on Thursday by the revelation that Worcester would be binned and that the new owners instead plan to amalgamate with Stourbridge and return to rugby a few grassroots leagues below the Championship.

This outcome didn’t sit well with Diamond, who had been director of rugby at Worcester when the club played its final Premiership match last September before its collapse. He had quickly hatched his own consortium plan to rescue the Warriors and have them back in business in time for the Championship next September.

However, despite passing the RFU fit and proper test and also agreeing to pay every creditor all the money they were owed by the club, the bid that Diamond was involved in lost out to Atlas. He insisted at the time of that announcement that he had no gripe that his consortium had lost out, but he tweeted his disgust on Thursday night after learning that Worcester were no more.

Diamond then followed that social media post up with a passionate six-and-a-half-minute Friday morning interview with Toni McDonald on BBC Hereford & Worcester. Below, RugbyPass brings you every word of that blistering interview:

McDonald: What do you think of Worcester Warriors being no more?
Diamond: Very upset, really, and disappointed. Firstly, the consortium I was involved in was Adam Hewitt, a local businessman, and we were delighted that there were three other consortiums vying to save the Warriors. It was never a rivalry for us, it was if we are good enough to get there and help keep the legacy and futureproof what Cecil Duckworth had delivered for many years, if it then wasn’t us it would be another forthright but honourable consortium and we will see where that one goes.

McDonald: What are your thoughts on the new owners’ plans, what they have put forward?
Diamond: I have not seen the whole sort of menu of what there are doing, just the stuff that has come on public record, changing the name, dropping down the leagues, potentially damaging another rugby club – ie. Stourbridge. That is going to be a very difficult decision for them [Stourbridge] to make. There is an old saying that in desperate times people do desperate things and it looks like they are clutching at straws. I have been through this process before in 2016, I was part of the sale and purchase of Sale Sharks and I identified local businessmen in Manchester who bought the club and invested and took it on to a new level. That is the same sort of process that myself and Adam Hewitt have been through with the RFU, with the administrator.

McDonald: Jim O’Toole would say what is what they would do with Stourbridge. It’s in a lower league at the moment but that will become the first team and they will invest in bringing that club on as Sixways Rugby.
Diamond: Well, Sixways Rugby might have a new sort of desire for some people but as your listeners just quite rightly said, Worcester is a very proud city and cities generally are very proud of their sporting teams. Sixways is an infrastructure roundabout on the M5 so it doesn’t really bode well to rugby people. It is great to have a plan but this plan has never been identified or discussed moving forward. The people who take over the legacy of Mr Duckworth have to have a plan for Worcester Warriors, have to have a plan. Now the DCMS and local MP Mr Walker have demanded parliamentary committee hearings, the RFU, the governing body, have been hauled over the coals and I knew that any business plan had to stand up to rigorous questioning. That appears not to have happened and that is why this sort of tangent has been taken to go down two, three divisions, and amalgamate with another first team of another club. Your business plan has to be rigorous to get through professional rugby.

McDonald: So what would you have done if you acquired it?
Diamond: What would I have done? I would be playing in the Championship in September.

McDonald: But they are saying what the RFU has put before them, they don’t want to meet those demands, they are too restrictive. You wouldn’t agree with that?
Diamond: No. Our plan was accepted by the RFU and we agreed with every point that the RFU put in front of us – including paying the rugby creditors.

McDonald: So how do you feel now that you have lost out on the bid and this is what is happening to the club?
Diamond: I feel like the administrator has a statutory duty to the creditors. The rugby creditors are not looked upon as secured creditors by the administrator so there is a loophole. In the grand scheme of things, there are players, sponsors, supporters, staff who are all owed a hell of a lot of money and none of them will receive any of that because of this. Now if you had passed the fit and proper test, part of that is agreeing to pay the unlimited amount of rugby creditors which our consortium agreed to pay. We feel that to build a rugby club after what has happened in the last 18 months that working with local suppliers is really important. Getting the support of the supporter base, who bought all their season tickets and only watched two games, is important. And more importantly, what nobody knows is the human effect of what has gone on. There are players and staff who moved from various areas of the world, New Zealand, Australia, who never received a paycheque, who were hoping that the rugby creditors would be paid because some of them haven’t been able to ship their furniture back home. There is a huge human toll on what has happened at Worcester and I think people are just looking, ‘Well, is there a property deal out there?’ Our plan was clear. We didn’t want to develop the site for at least five years. Get the rugby into the Championship, make it sustainable, answer the rigorous questions that we answered in the fit and proper test which were what happens if you forecast blue sky thinking doesn’t work? Very simple, we cut the playing squad. Someone who is an expert in this like myself has done it for 25 years.

McDonald: You have been through it before?
Diamond: I have. And Adam Hewitt, a local businessman, it works. It needs a combination. It needs somebody passionate. Cecil Duckworth was passionate, he was a local businessman. Adam Hewitt, the irony of it, he also sponsors Stourbridge as well as being the main sponsor at Worcester Warriors. So we have got a situation where we are now not going to see elite rugby. It has a massive effect on the community programmes, has a massive effect on the Foundation. We have got a brilliant charitable foundation called Worcester Warriors but no Worcester Warriors.

McDonald: Steve, thank you for your time this morning. Really appreciate your thoughts, you can hear the passion there.

• Click here to listen to the Steve Diamond interview