MARTIN JEPSON has revealed that if he hadn’t invested in Castleford Tigers then the club could have gone the same way as Salford Red Devils.
Jepson was finally confirmed as majority shareholder earlier this month after his investment helped the Tigers reach a Grade A under the IMG gradings towards the back end of last year.
However, there was a delay to that agreement which had to be triggered on or before January 31, with due diligence and other necessary work taking place in order to finalise the deal.
As a result, all parties agreed to push the deadline back until the end of the April.
Now Jepson has made a striking admission about the previous regime at The Jungle.
“The club has been run down, down and down and run on a shoestring budget,” Jepson said on The COYFCast podcast.
“It became quite clear over the past 12 months that mine and the other board members’ views were different on how we needed to get hold of the club.
“Ultimately it got to a point where I was either all in or all out. We had different views so we reached an agreement. It wasn’t the gameplan on day one.
“I wanted to invest money to not only get a license for Super League but to up the salary levels we were committing to.
“But the budgets I was given day one and the actual budget I was given were a million miles apart.
“The intention of the money I injected into the club was that it would last three or four years. The reality is it lasted a year.
“That’s the warning signal but it’s the warning signal for every club. The investment was needed and, frankly, if it wasn’t invested then we probably would have been where Salford are.”
Jepson has also revealed that there could be three or four announcements with regards to new directors.
“There will be an announcement on the next couple of weeks. There are only two directors, me and Steve Vause, but I will want to make a couple of new appointments in this month to join me – maybe even three or four announcements.
“I can’t name all the names now because we are still talking about opportunities that exist. I have got someone who is close to investing in the club and that’s ultimately why I took the punt to exercise the option.
“One thing that has been missing has been structure. The club needs to be run as a proper business so we need to put proper structures in place and proper accountabilities in place.”
Jepson also took aim at the previous media team and explained how the club was placed in turmoil with resignations and sick leave.
“The media team is one classic example. We have changed that, we still may not have got it right. If people knew what went on behind the scenes then they would probably understand it a bit more.
“We forget that we are very much in the community and people live and breathe the club. They’ve got passionate opinions but sometimes those opinions can be a little unrealistic when you don’t quite know what’s going on.
“We have struggled with our media team. It is one of the things I complained about day one. We had a media team in November that wasn’t fit for purpose.
“We had a period where the two junior members left for good reasons for that and then we appointed the new head of marketing who then resigned and the media went on sick leave.
“We went from heaving three on the team to nobody and we were getting pillaried.”
