Former Worcester Warriors’ centre Ollie Lawrence believes that rugby club owners cannot reasonably seek to make a profit from their businesses.
Lawrence, who has made a successful switch to Bath since Worcester went into administration, feels that it was Colin Goldring and Jason Whittingham’s belief that this could be the case that was largely responsible for the downfall of the club.
Speaking on The Rugby Paper Podcast, he said: “They bought a club on the basis of thinking they could make money away from rugby, their incentive was never the rugby, it was always just the profit they could make from Sixways itself and the surrounding areas.
“No rugby club is really profitable, there aren’t really many. So you don’t want to have people who don’t really care about the rugby.”
Lawrence evidences the fact that the owners did not care about the playing side of the business by their failure to keep staff informed about the state of the business, and provide support as the situation began to deteriorate.
He added: “In my opinion if they did care about the rugby, they would have spoken to the people that are actually working for them before allowing this to unfold.
“They weren’t in the building for a good six months. We didn’t see them, they didn’t speak to us.
“They’d be at games, but in terms of coming over to the far side and seeing how we were, talking to us about any of this situation, that never happened.
“That really left a sour taste to be honest with you because they must’ve seen this coming and known what they were doing and they hung us out to dry.
Despite evidently feeling frustrated about the situation Lawrence does feel there are some silver linings to be drawn from the saga.
He is encouraged by the fact the former owners have now been disqualified as company directors for 12 months after failing to file accounts for the financial year to 28 February 2021, and he believes clear lessons of how to run a rugby club that is having financial issues have emerged.
“Everything’s coming out now as to what they’ve done, and they’re being reprimanded for their actions, as they should be.
“And there’s a lesson that communication has to be there. If you are struggling as a club, the first people that need to know about it are the players and staff. Without us you don’t have a club in the first place.
“We’re the ones going out there every weekend trying to get results for people that knew that this club wasn’t even going to exist six months down the line so I think that says a lot about them really.”
There are mixed emotions for Lawrence as he considers the success he and Ted Hill have had at Bath, as well as Finn Smith at Northampton Saints and Jay Tyack at Bristol among other names who have thrived upon their exit from the club.
While he is happy to see so many ex-Warriors doing so well, it leaves him with a feeling of what could have been at Sixways, especially after they won the Premiership Rugby Cup earlier this year.
“It really shows you how good our squad was.” He said, “Things just weren’t clicking for us, I know that’s easy to say but I think we’d got to the point where we were clicking and things were about to be special off the back of winning that Prem Cup.
“It was the first bit of silverware that we’d won for a long time and it was the back of that, and leading into this season that brought us tighter as a squad and gave us confidence.
“In some ways that makes the whole situation so much harder to take.”
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