THERE comes a time in every sport when one personality and character enters the realm and everyone sits up and takes notice.
In rugby league, that personality was Dr Marwan Koukash.
The Palestine-born racehorse owner entered the 13-man code in 2013 before exiting in 2018, but along the way he made a name for himself as one of the most outspoken characters to ever enter rugby league.
Changing Salford’s name from ‘City Reds’ to ‘Red Devils’ and splashing the cash to bring the likes of Rangi Chase, Gareth Hock, Francis Meli and Tony Puletua to the club, Koukash had a dream of winning every piece of silverware possible.
Of course, as everyone in rugby league knows, that dream fell like a lead balloon, and, after five years, Koukash sold to a fans’ consortium.
Things went from bad to worse for Koukash, with an individual insolvency case for bankruptcy revealing that the 65-year-old had been stripped of all his assets, following an order given on 13th September 2022.
But now he has reflected on his time in charge at Salford and how he got involved in the sport following a chance meeting with Nigel Wood, the then chief executive of the RFL, on a plane to Dubai.
“One day I was travelling to Dubai and I sat next to a guy who must have thought it’s his lucky day, because he was the CEO of the Rugby League. And I think they’ve been desperate for a while to attract me into the sport in order to own a club or get involved in the club in order to raise the profile of the sport,” Koukash said on the Meet Sean O’Neill podcast.
“By the end of the flight somehow, he managed to get me interested in the sport. So, I said to him, okay, when I get back from Dubai, we’ll meet up again and we’ll look at what this club he was offering me has to offer. The club was called Salford City Reds.
“I talked to the owners and I remember going to sign on the dotted line and I said to this guy – his name is Nigel – ‘I said, Nigel, I can’t believe what I’m doing.’ He said, ‘what do you mean?’ I said, ‘I’m going to buy a rugby club and I know nothing about the sport.’ He said to me, ‘well what do you want to know?’ ‘How many players make up a team?’ I didn’t even know that.
“I went there and signed in the dotted line pretending to know a lot about the sport. Then a week later was our first game.”
Koukash then took to the stands for his first game as owner of Salford, but there was a great deal of pain in the early months.
“The first game of the season, right? What it told me is that the club I had bought, all the good players in the team had left because they were going through financial difficulty and I didn’t know how bad we were until the first game.
“And in the first game, I said to one of the coaching staff who was sat next to me and explain to me what’s going on, what goes on during a match because I don’t know about tackles kicking whatever I’ve never watched a rugby game in my life before I watched my team – the team I’ve just bought.
“The game started and the only thing that I could follow genuinely is the scoreboard. We were up against the biggest or the strongest team in the competition called Wigan. And it goes 6 nil, 12 nil, 18 nil. And I’m thinking **** hell, what have I bought? Right? 24 nil. We ended up losing 54 nil.
“The next game was in France. Went there and we came back losing 28 nil. Third game was a little bit better we lost 64-4. So, at least we scored some points but then came the fourth game and we played London.
“We got bloody hammered absolutely hammered at home to the worst team. And that’s when I realised something has to be done. I didn’t like the name Salford City Reds. It looked soft, right?”
It was at that moment that Koukash decided to make sweeping changes throughout the club.
“So, on the way from behind the sticks to going back to the dressing room or change room where the boys were. I decided to call the club, rename it in my mind. It’s going to be called Salford Red Devils instead of Salford City Reds.
“Then I went to see the team and the coach and it’s like none of them were bloody bothered. The fans I was with were gutted to being humiliated like that to a team like London and the players and the coaching staff, so what? And that’s when I needed to make the change. And I made big changes. I asked the CEO to come up to see me and I said to him go downstairs and tell the coach, this time is up.
“He said ‘what do you mean?’ I said, just tell him this time is up. He said, can we have a meeting about meeting to discuss? I said, go and tell him his time is up. And so, he went downstairs came back tell me I’ve told him asked him, can I tell you something else as well, you’re part of the failure and your time is up now, changes now. so, I’ve got rid of the CEO that day too.
I got rid of coach and that’s when I started making the changes, serious changes because I wasn’t going to carry on being part of a team that was getting hammered every day.
“And then within two weeks we started making changes: signing players, proper decent players. And, listen within two three years of that date, we were competing for trophies. So, the changes I made I didn’t make them just for the sake of making them. I made them for success.”
However, it was the club’s infamous salary cap breach and the resulting points deduction that paved the way for Salford to be battling at the bottom of Super League in 2016.
“In rugby, there’s a cap in which there’s only so much money you could spend…The very people who took wanted me in the sport by then started wanting me out.
“I was called for disciplinaries every bloody month. I was going up to Leeds and they’d find something about me or about the club.
“That was until one day when it came out in the news that the authorities charged my club with breaches of salary cap regulations. Even I couldn’t defend it because I did cheat, I did overspend.
“And as a result, they took points from my club that during that season, took us down from near the top to relegation. Genuinely by that time, they probably wanted my club out of the top league. So, we had to play Hull KR.”
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