Leigh Leopards’ irresistible rise has been one of rugby league’s great tales in recent years. This is the inside story of their success – and an insight into their future.
“I REMEMBER turning up at the end of 2021 and there were six players here. You think: ‘What the hell have we done here?’ It’s an incredible journey we’ve been on.”
Adrian Lam can certainly say that again. Treble winners, Wembley heroes and genuine Super League contenders – how unlikely that all seemed three-and-a-half years ago.
Leigh had just been relegated from the top flight, winning only two of their 22 games after being awarded a Super League place by committee the previous December.
One of those six players was Keanan Brand, now the club’s longest-serving player and a loanee from Warrington that campaign before signing permanently after.
“I remember we had front-rowers playing halfback and stuff like that,” Brand recalls. “It was very tough. It wasn’t quite lambs to the slaughter, but with the squad we had it always going to be difficult.”
Almost every member of the squad left at season’s end that September, when the club recruited Chris Chester – only a month removed from his five-year spell as Wakefield coach – to be their head of rugby.
Chester says: “I met Neil (Jukes, then general manager and now CEO) and Derek (Beaumont, owner) at Birch services. Derek basically said ‘you’ve got full backing, it’s your baby, you do what you see fit’.
His first job was to find a coach: “The biggest signing has been Adrian Lam. I met a lot of coaches before I spoke to Adrian. I knew he was a quality person and I knew he’d brought players like Bevan French and Jai Field over (to previous club Wigan) so he had a good eye for talent.
“He said I should look at this player and that player, and it turned out one I’d already signed and one I’d already spoken to!”
Lam picks up the story: “I remember when I was leaving Wigan, I was heading back to the NRL to have a coaching role there – not a major one but a decent one.
“Chris Chester asked if I’d consider staying another year in the UK and going to the Championship. I was like ‘no, not really mate’.
“But I rang Mal Meninga (Australia coach – Lam was his assistant at the time) and he said ‘if you can go there and make a massive difference, you’ll get respect around the world. On top of that, if you can be successful there you’ll get promoted back up and then you stick it right up everyone’.
“I thought about that and decided I should meet Chris Chester. We had a conversation and at the end I said ‘there’s two Championship players I was looking at with Wigan who you should sign.
“Three days later, breaking news – Leigh sign those two players. I’m reading this thinking ‘f*** me dead!’. If they’re going to sign the players I want and I like, we could do anything here. That changed everything. I get goosebumps talking about it.”
With Chester and Lam in place, the journey began. The likes of Tom Amone, John Asiata and Edwin Ipape joined before the season started and a trickle of fresh signings continued throughout the 2022 campaign – Kai O’Donnell and Blake Ferguson in April, Josh Charnley in June, coach’s son Lachlan Lam in July.
The end result was all three available trophies, culminating a Grand Final win over Batley for promotion.
“That team would have beaten a few Super League sides that year,” says Chester. “At the time I didn’t really think about it, but we’d signed people for the following year like (Ricky) Leutele and (Zak) Hardaker and (Oliver) Holmes. I look back now thinking what the hell the owner would have gone through that night before we played Batley! We invested a lot of money – I was under instructions to spend the full (Super League salary) cap and by the time we got to Batley we weren’t far off – and if things had gone pair-shaped in that final, we would have had a huge shortfall.”
But Beaumont’s gamble paid off. So, despite much initial scepticism, did his next move – a bold rebrand of the club, from Leigh Centurions to Leopards. The Super League bounce was turbo-charged by the new identity, plus a focus on turning matchdays into events with live music. Merchandise sales went through the roof while attendances more than doubled in one season.
The greatest day of the Leigh revival so far came on 12th August, 2023, when Lachlan Lam kicked the winning Golden Point field-goal in extra time of the Challenge Cup Final against Hull KR. One of the enduring images was Beaumont, in his leopard-print jacket, sprinting onto the field to start the celebrations.
If that was the climax, what a fantastic tale it would have been. Indeed, when Leigh slid down the league table post-Challenge Cup and lost in the first round of the play-offs, it did indeed look like the end of the club’s meteoric rise.
As it turned out, this was just the beginning.
That in large part is down to a relentless determination to improve the team, with a large turnover of players each year. Fourteen new faces joined before or during the 2023 season, in 2024 came another dozen and, ahead of the 2025 season, a further ten.
The hits have outweighed the misses, evidenced by a first play-off semi-final last season, and coach Lam offers a fascinating insight into that success.
“My philosophy as a coach is that I have a particular style I want to play and standards I set. Then I go out and get the players that can play that style and have the personality to meet those standards,” he says.
“I literally give it to them to run, the way I want to play, but then I empower them to drive the way that we train and play. With that comes accountability and ownership.
“I think I identify talent as well as anyone in the game. That’s not giving myself a rap, that’s just my background. I did recruitment for the (Sydney) Roosters. I know the style works if everyone is on the same page.
“I think the hardest bit to do is to get them to care about each other and feel like they’re a family. It’s hard to build that camaraderie but, once you have it, it’s very hard to break.”
Bringing a new group together every year is an achievement in itself, and Leigh’s start to this season – unbeaten after four rounds at the time of writing – suggests they have done it to great effect again.
One of this year’s arrivals, veteran Kiwi international forward Isaac Liu, says: “The boys have been really welcoming and the coaches as well. You feel the club is a family club.
“The process of getting to know each other is good. We had a camp in Lanzarote which was really good. It’s always tough when you have new guys coming in and the first couple of rounds can be wobbly, but it felt like we’d really gelled together in the first round (a remarkable 1-0 win over champions Wigan) and the last few weeks have been good too.
“You can tell by the first round, that performance showed we can make it to the end. We still have a long way to go as a team but we can be up there with those top teams.”
The recruitment all fits into a five-year plan formulated when Chester and Lam first arrived. While experience was particularly valued as Leigh sought promotion and then consolidation in Super League, now focus has turned to youth, with Liu the only addition for this season over the age of 25.
“We wanted to build a team this year which would be here for a number of years, and the only way to do that is to get them at a young age,” explains Chester, whose latest recruits include 23-year-old stars David Armstrong and Tesi Niu.
Brand, himself still only 26, observes: “The squad is young, fresh and hungry. When I first joined in 2021 we had a lot of older players at the back end of their careers, and 2022 had a similar vibe. Last year was the big change in the rotation of players. This year we’ve brought a lot of youth in.
“At the start of the year people wrote us off because of that but it’s done the opposite. It’s driven competition. It’s made us better as a squad and you can see that in our games.”
This goes hand-in-hand with progress across the wider club. A reserves team started playing last season and, this year, an elite academy and scholarship pathway has been launched, headed by Kieron Purtill (who also coaches the women’s team recently promoted to Super League) with the ultimate aim of bringing local talent into the first team.
There are currently three players from Leigh in their squad, in Frankie Halton, Louis Brogan and Andy Badrock, a deliberate move as Lam reveals: “Every year I’ve been here, my goal has been to bring one in.”
Badrock was the latest last winter, a back-rower who turned down a place in Warrington’s academy because of the distance and instead climbed from his amateur club to Super League via semi-pro Swinton.
“I was in Warrington’s scholarship and they did offer me a contract for Under-19s but it just didn’t work out for me with the commute and going to college, so I opted to carry on playing at Leigh Miners,” says Badrock.
Lam now wants to see such talents coming through at the Leopards: “The future for us is to bring as many local juniors into our system as soon as we can.
“I want that to get out to all the Leigh junior clubs because at the moment one of the big let-downs is anyone can come in and take our juniors. We want them to choose us in future. If I’m here in ten years’ time, I want half my team to be local players.”
Leigh’s rise has been the product of strategic planning and bold ambition, on and off the field. With the project far from its end, who would bet against them rising further still?
First published in Rugby League World magazine, Issue 507 (April 2025)