New London Irish owners 'would love to be in Champ at earliest opportunity'

London Irish chief executive Jamie Balls has said the club could play in Champ Rugby as early as next season and has an ambitious plan to build its own stadium within five years.

Essex-based entrepreneur Steve Daniels, who made his fortune in the energy sector, purchased the club’s name, brand and associated intellectual property from Kyle Jordan, son of late former Formula 1 team owner Eddie Jordan, and Daniel McKeown.

Daniels, 47, who played amateur rugby for Colchester, co-founded PE Solutions, which reportedly grew to a turnover of £1.4bn within seven years, and is a partner of the Rugby Football Union and has hired former England scrum-half Kyran Bracken as a director.

The Exiles, who went out of business in 2023, are owned by Daniels’ firm Gamechanger Investments and have been linked with a move to the United Rugby Championship, but Balls says the Champ and ultimately the Gallagher PREM are their long-term aim.

“Look what’s happening in the Champ at the moment. I’m really excited. Look at Pirates down there with Nick Knowles and all that sort of stuff; the Champ has got a buzz about it again, which is fantastic.

“There is no entry to the PREM until we get the details of what’s happening in 2029-2030. If we’re going anywhere, it will be the Champ, but we have to go through the process; we have no place in the Champ as of today.

“We can hopefully follow a similar sort of model to Worcester. We’d be very happy with the Championship, as a destination, and go back to organic growth.

“Let’s go there and then see what the future looks like. We would love to be in the Champ at the earliest opportunity, and if there’s an opportunity next season and they allow us to do so, we would like to go then. If it’s not then, we’ll wait another year,” said Balls.

The club currently doesn’t have a ground or training ground, and they have been linked with a move to AFC Wimbledon’s Plough Lane home, and their former training base, the state-of-the-art Hazelwood Centre in Sunbury-on-Thames.

Like the Exiles PREM P shares, the ownership is in the hands of the bankrupt club’s administrators, but Balls said the club won’t be moving far from their south-west London base, and they are having talks to buy the site.

“We’ve got eyes on a short-term move to a stadium, and there are a number of people who have approached us already to say we really would love you coming here. But we’ve got eyes on a new-build stadium as well.

“But that is three to five years, even if we’ve got the pre-app in now. But there are organisations out there that are financially struggling at stadiums at the moment, that might be very ripe to become one of ours that we can build around that.

“We certainly want to take lessons we learned from the past, which is ultimately, moving too far away from south-west London is not a good thing to do. We need to be in that area, and you can look at a number of sites within that area, current rugby ones and football ones.

“Hazelwood, there’s 53 acres in south-west London that went into administration. We’d love to have that back and we’re in negotiations there. That gives us not just a matchday stadium, but an every day stadium.

“And what people want now, they want dwell time on site. You know, families want to turn up at a venue, and they want not just one sport, they want other things. We will look to commercialise around the rugby. So that site has potential for us.

“But just to be absolutely clear, we have not got ownership of Hazelwood at the moment. That is a process we have to go through, and we are following the due process to get that done,” he added.