League Express editor MARTYN SADLER is keeping his fingers crossed for the Red Devils.
In last week’s League Express I made a plea for other club owners to come to Salford’s aid to ensure that the club will be able to compete in Super League in 2025, despite its current financial difficulties.
Inevitably that plea seems to have fallen on deaf ears, despite the fact that it would have been the best solution to retain the integrity of the Super League competition.
The Salford chief executive Paul King is banking on a deal coming to fruition this week that will see the Red Devils being acquired by an Australian consortium (not the Brisbane Broncos).
I hope he’s right and that the new owners, if they take the plunge, can invest some working capital into the club to stave off its creditors, including HMRC, while giving the Salford supporters an injection of confidence.
The Salford chief was originally hoping that the deal would go through by Tuesday, but that deadline now appears to have been stretched to Friday, before Salford will have to begin offloading players to other clubs to comply with a salary cap limit of £1.2 million imposed by the RFL.
If that happens, I hope that the leading clubs in Super League will be prepared to lend players to Salford at no cost to the Red Devils to keep them reasonably competitive.
The worst solution, of course, would be for Salford to fail to get to the starting gate, leaving Super League with only eleven clubs. That would send out a terrible signal, not least to potential broadcasters.
The second worst solution would be to have a Salford team that was so weakened that it lost every game it played, conceding scorelines of 40 or more points each week.
So I’m still hoping that the other clubs will rally round to help, while also realising that it is in their best interests to do so.
