SALFORD RED DEVILS head coach Paul Rowley has taken aim at what he has described as a “ticking time bomb” following the IMG grading scores handed to all 35 professional clubs last week.
The Red Devils found themselves just 0.39 points ahead of Toulouse Olympique, with 13.97 points as opposed to the French side’s 13.58.
It means that whilst Salford are in Super League for 2025, their position could well be under threat come 2026.
And for Red Devils boss Rowley, he believes that performance should be given 50 per cent of the weighting amongst the five pillars of Finance, Fandom, Stadium, Community and Performance.
“I love the fact that they’re raising standards,” Rowley said on BBC Radio Manchester.
“The teams that have gone from B’s to A’s have worked tremendously hard on all of their gradings, so I don’t bemoan that at all.
“I just think the weighting is not in favour of performance, nowhere near enough. It should be the majority of it, in my opinion.
“I’d liked to have seen us just go 50 per cent of the whole grade based on performance and then the other 50 per cent accumulated from the facets you’ve just mentioned previously (Fandom, Finance, Stadium and Community).
“But on performance, again, we can stomach it as athletes if you get relegated on performance. It’s hard to take and it still crushes your dreams, your mortgages, your weddings, your holidays, your kids’ education.
“We’re human beings and we’re put in a time bomb. The boards now of every club that’s on a Grade B, there’s effectively now a ticking time bomb.
“We can say, ‘well it’s up to the clubs, it’s their responsibility to upgrade and do whatever – get the screen, get the pixels’, whatever that may be.
“But still, 80 to 90 percent of the business in terms of numbers doesn’t have enough influence on their own destiny. That can’t be right in any walk of life.”
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