LEIGH LEOPARDS owner Derek Beaumont admits the situation at Salford Red Devils “pains” him but that the club needs to be “accountable” following its financial predicament.
Super League clubs are meeting today to discuss potentially giving 11 of the remaining top flight clubs salary cap dispensation to take players off Salford’s hands.
That follows a series of financial problems which saw the Red Devils get an advance of £500,000 on their central distribution funding late last year, whilst they have since been directed by the RFL to sell players to raise £800,000.
For Beaumont, he believes the Salford issue is bringing rugby league into disrepute and took aim at Keighley Cougars’ offer to fund travel and have collection buckets ahead of their proposed friendly this weekend.
That friendly has since been cancelled after the Red Devils withdrew, but Beaumont called that particular issue “laughable”.
“Of course it pains me but you’ve got to be accountable for your actions,” Beaumont told League Express.
“I don’t like seeing anyone struggling or in pain or seeing someone whose job is at risk and someone who is running a business with insurmountable stress and who probably won’t have slept properly for a long time.
“It’s not good to see but at the same time I don’t like seeing our game being brought into disrepute. I don’t like seeing the damage it’s doing to us as a sport.
“We’ve landed a partner like Jet 2 and all the noise is around a club that needs a £500k advance and might be going bust going to Portugal on a warm weather camp and Keighley are chipping in to get a coach over there to play a friendly with a bucket collection.
“Imagine Charlton Athletic paying for Manchester United to get a coach down to play and have a bucket collection to try and keep them going. It’s laughable.
“I’d like to think Keighley did that with the right intentions but a part of me thinks they are taking the piss – that’s how it looks.
“Journalists are doing their job and all you’ve got is crap and negativity because that’s all that keeps getting dished up and we have to be accountable for that.”
Beaumont referenced the time when he almost left the sport following Leigh’s failure to make the Championship play-offs in 2018 and the financial issues that followed.
Now he has no idea how Salford will fare going forward even if they do get the required player sales given the past year.
“I’ve been there and done it with my own club when I got a blow I never planned for. When you’re spending £1.8 million in a part-time Championship competition after relegation and you’ve got Keiron Cunningham as director of rugby, there’s a massive threat from Toronto so the risk of the £500k parachute payment goes and I’m stuck with the same contracts the year after and I was ok with that.
“I never thought we wouldn’t make the top six, I would have said you were talking out your arse. That cost me £600,000 and I couldn’t do that. I had to get the club safe and I feel like that’s the situation here.
“I hope someone does take it over. I want a strong Salford, we need a competitive team but what’s really going to happen there? Nobody knows and the season is getting closer. There has been no direction about the special measures.
“This hasn’t happened overnight, last year Brodie Croft and Andy Ackers were sold for a reported £300k. A reported 370,000 fans bought in shareholding schemes and yet they need 500k to pay wages and liabilities in November from that same season.
“How will that survive this season going forward even if they do get off the mark? They can’t get players off the salary cap because they haven’t got rid of the NFT. We all voted on a proposal which didn’t want to extend the salary cap which isn’t the right thing to do.
“But we never separated off getting rid of the NFT restrictions once a player has left Salford for another club. Paul King (Salford’s CEO) is there and can’t do anything.
“He is being told to get the salary cap down to £1.2 million but he can’t because he’s got nowhere he can send his players to.”
